Chapter 23: Anti Ageing and Mind Health

 

The following are some thoughts and observations that occurred to me as I sought to effect an anti ageing program. This subject is a crucial and intrinsic part of this book, but, there is not the space at this time for more than a cursory glance.

 

(1) Total happiness: Anti-ageing consists of three interrelated factors, nutrition, exercise and mental state. Mental state seems to be an unusual factor, but it turns out to be a most important factor because both nutrition and exercise depend on the mind and the mind depends on nutrition and exercise. The relationship is determined by the first Law of Life, which is composed of iteration, componentization and the passage of time.

 

Componentization links exercise and mental state, and nutrition is linked also to mental state. These will be considered over two chapters because they are so important, but anti-ageing itself is important because we all want to get the most out of life.

 

Anti aging is a half-truth because you can’t stop aging because time continually passes, just as you can’t stop time passing. Anti ageing is true to a certain extent otherwise I wouldn’t be going to all this trouble, but aging is Real Age and is measured against the average health of the population at that age. It is often said that Real Age is some combination of Chronological Age, Functional Age and Metabolic Age

 

Where chronological age is your age in years, and continues to increase, functional age is the age that you function at. I am suggesting that you are younger if you Rock’n’Roll for a few hours, a couple of times a week than if you watch TV during that time. Similarly, metabolic age is some estimate of the age of your functioning processes and someone who smokes cigarettes would have an ‘older’ body than someone who doesn’t smoke cigarettes. It is interesting that a smoker’s risk profile for cancer, after they give up smoking, returns to the non-smoker’s profile after about 5 years.

 

It is apparent that all of these inter-related concepts need the Mathematics of the Mind, but, each person is different with different choices so that it might be best to present my ideas and let the reader gradually get use to them and choose their own path. I think that everyone will agree that ANY extra healthy time is worthwhile, but it is the individual’s choice.

 

. So, what am I trying to maximize? Probably lifetime happiness, but:

 

Lifetime happiness = daily happiness per day summed over the total number of days lived

 

daily happiness = some sum of (no pain, not being poor, having companionship, being healthy, having a home, having work to do etc)

 

But using the Mathematics of the Mind, the happiness in the past is less than our happiness in the present and in the future because happiness in the past is a memory and is obviously less than that being experienced in the present and the expectation of the future.

 

Effectively, discounting the past as it has passed:.

 

Future Happiness = future daily happiness times length of future life

 

Then Total lifetime happiness = (approx) future daily happiness times length of future life.

 

That doesn’t sound promising! Apart from pleasant memories, we have to stay as healthy as possible and live as long as possible. In other words, the traditional decline into old age has to be turned into a flat line with a sharp decline into the final moments. This would maximize the happiness because the summation is maximized.

 

postscript: Surprisingly, this equation is important because this book tries to maximize the number of days left to us by nutrition, exercise and state of mind, and maximizing our enjoyment of those days through the Forever Club.

 

Both the future daily happiness and the length of future life depend principally on the attractors:

 

 

Nutrition ……………..state of mind ……………………. exercise

 

(2) Speed of movement: Looking at state of mind, consider a group or herd, that comprises a dominant male and a group of females. Young males and old males take their chances outside the herd with predators, and old females act as grandmothers within the herd. The herd guards the young and the old become food for predators. This is the altruistic aim of the old, to provide food for the predators that are harassing the herd. I believe that the old, when they no longer feel useful, slow down, so they are taken by predators in preference to the rest of the herd.

 

The above paragraph shows that it would be advantageous if older animals, in general, slowed down, so that they were preferentially more at risk than younger animals and experiments have been done showing that the slower that humans walk, the shorter is their life span from the time of measurement. How many times has it been said that someone will slow down when they retire. There is a general slowing down with age because people think that they should slow down, or ought to slow down or deserve to slow down. Perhaps the slowing down is aging! Perhaps ageing is mentally induced!

 

Many years ago, I read a Science Fiction story about someone that didn’t age because they did not take note of time passing, but, the essence of this story was that they did not slow their lifestyle. It is difficult to expect someone to continue working 40 hours a week in a job, but it could be expected, as I do, to work several hours gardening a day. Also, fast dancing is very important to me. It is the amount of fast movement that is important. Remember, children run, adults walk and the old hobble! These are generalizations, but it doesn’t make them false.

 

But, it is not just the exercise. A gardening business requires speed of working to charge money, and it is a means of causing the mind to increase speed of movement. A business is very important because, if you need to slow, you work longer at a lower rate of pay. There is a well known saying that if you do something every day, you can do it forever and if you exercise every day, you will always be able to do that exercise! And, if you can do that exercise, you don’t become old, or, importantly feel pain doing that exercise.

 

(3) Healthy mind: The mind has to be healthy if we want to increase happiness and ‘diseases of the mind’ must be overcome. No one in a healthy state of mind wants to end up poor, dead or debilitated because of diseases of the mind, such as gambling, lying, dishonesty, cruelty and all the other failings that religion has warned us about. In fact, the ideas in this book resulted from the interplay of the virtues of dancing versus the problems of poker machines.

 

However, let’s leave this subject to the religions because, I surmise that these people are unlikely to have genes that humanity would want carried into the future. That is a common idea, but, not correct because intelligence is upbringing and stimulation, mental problems come about through up-bringing, as can be seen in the chapter on prisons and this brings us back to Survival of the Best and the Forever Club.

 

(4) Creativity and nutrition: ‘You are what you eat’ is literally true because the food supply determines your thinking! What I have called, the seventh sense, and it is very important because the state of the food supply, temperature, competition for food etc changes the animal’s thinking and re-aligns the thinking to suit the changed conditions. This is a result of plant chemicals returning the thinking of the animal to the way that the animal successfully weathered the same conditions in the past.

 

High levels of phytotoxins means that the food supply is under stress and the animal thinks defensibly, whilst low levels mean good growing weather and the animal should act creatively by increasing offspring to move into niches. Niches are important for evolution because that is where the animal can evolve from when change in environment etc. occurs, because the ability is there, if needed. Humans evolved from the unsuccessful monkeys that couldn’t compete with the fruit-eating monkeys in the trees, and they developed stronger teeth for eating rougher fare, because they couldn’t compete for the soft fruits. This ability to survive on a non-fruit diet allowed them to move away from the trees.

 

(5) The mind and exercise: I have mentioned the importance of speed of movement, but what is the effect of exercise on the mind? The mind is ‘linked’ into the body to create a ‘reality’ along with other nerve groups throughout the body. The mind has the job of keeping the animal alive to the best of its ability, and that is survival of the fittest, but the body is required to operate in the lowest ‘energy’ state, so with very good food, the body is encouraged to luxuriate in a higher state and by using exercise sufficiently, not to exhaustion, but ‘sufficiently’, the body is raised to a higher level than is required to co-exist with the rest of the herd. This componetization is the basis of survival of the fittest because the fittest, given the local conditions, can breed more successfully than the weaker members.

 

So there are four major ways that we are able to move the body/mind ‘up a notch’, through creativity, speed of movement, exercise and nutrition. Exercising to exhaustion is not nice and I have found that I have set a limit on exercise because even ‘old (in years)’ bodies can put on muscle to such an extent that I feel extra exercise to be unnecessary.

 

‘Exercise turns out to be the closest thing to a wonder drug that self-control scientists have discovered. For starters, the will power benefits of exercise are immediate. Fifteen minutes on a treadmill reduces cravings, as seen when researchers try to tempt dieters with chocolate and smokers with cigarettes. The long-term, effects of exercise are even more impressive. It not only relieves ordinary, everyday stress, but it’s as powerful an antidepressant as Prozac. Working out also enhances the biology of self-control by increasing baseline heart rate variability and training the brain. When neuroscientists have peered inside the brains of new exercisers, they have seen increases in both gray matter – brain cells – and white matter, the insulation on brain cells that helps them communicate quickly and efficiently with each other. Physical exercise – like meditation – makes your brain bigger and faster, and the prefrontal cortex shows the largest training effect.’ (The Willpower Instinct, Kelly McGonigal, p 42)

 

(6) Personal exercise: I hate exercising in a gym because it is hard work, costs money, costs time etc, so I use a different approach. I exercise, garden, work around the farm and dance. I do 100 pushups (2 x 50) to keep strength in my upper body, and about 4 minutes of ‘balance’ exercise.

 

Balance is the sixth sense and people tend to neglect it, especially as they get older. In fact, it could be considered that slowing down is ageing, and if you don’t slow down, you don’t age. So, balance should be part of an exercise regime, and it may save your life because: ‘A survey was made of 1592 patients, over the age of 50 years, who had sustained a fracture of the hip……..The mortality rate after 3 months was 17 per cent and that after 6 months 21.5 per cent……. The mortality after 1 year was 27 per cent, after 3 years 43 per cent and after 5 years 56 per cent’. (Mortality after hip fractures, J. Steen Jensen & E. Tondevold, Gentofte Hospital, Denmark)

 

The figures above show that life expectancy after a hip fracture can be low, and we should do all that we can to avoid fractures. This can be done by increasing bone density through food and exercise, such as dancing, and also by the following exercise. It should be noted that it can take a couple of years to be able to do this exercise properly. I stand on one leg with my eyes closed till I count to 130 quickly and repeat for each leg. That is four exercises, two on each leg. Note, with eyes closed!

 

What am I trying to accomplish? I have mentioned before that the nervous system is a component and will perform better if required, and it does that by laying down myelin on the nerves and this insulation speeds up the signals. The faster the signals travel, the faster the reaction time, also, new ganglion are set up through the body as part of the autonomous nervous system to counter-balance movement. The aim is to decrease reaction time if I trip and further the longest nerves are those from head to toes and are important in balance (as are the compensating muscle movement).

 

Finally, having to work fast because I am being paid, getting exercise from pruning etc, having to work because of commitments and dancing, complete the picture.

 

(7) The mind and pain: When we get a pain in a muscle or joint etc, the first thing that many people do is to reach for a ‘pain-killer’ tablet. Pain is a communication device between the body and the mind and it is the instigator of repairing the problem, so we have to work with the mind and the body’s natural pain-killers. I believe that the way to control the body is through the mind, as mentioned, previously, that a thought is held in the mind and that is enough to direct the body. Thoughts such as ‘if the muscle doesn’t fix itself, I can’t go hunting and will starve’. It could be a way of influencing the basis of the body/mind. It is an unproven theory, but it seems logical and seems to work.

 

The body is very attentive because if a muscle hurts, the body is saying don’t use the muscle, I’m fixing it. If you need to use the muscle (or joint, tendon etc), the body helps by reducing the pain. In fact, exercise augments the healing process by stressing that it needs to be used. A useful adjunct is to go to sleep for a short time and the body appears to work on the problem.

 

(8) Chronic pain: I have no experience with chronic pain and can only suggest that a three way approach might be successful using mental state, nutrition and exercise. I did develop a ‘ganglion’ on my wrist through over-exuberant use and that took 15 years to repair itself, and that occurred as my anti aging regime improved. I believe that our bones and joints are replaced every 2 to 7 years and this overhaul improved the condition when my diet and exercise improved.

 

(9) Educating the mind nutritionally: At birth the mind is unknown to us but I assume it to be the proverbial ‘blank slate’ and the traditional food is mother’s milk. As the baby grows it eats the same foods that its parents ate and just as they ate a wide variety of foods, so the baby eats a wide variety of foods and in the process its brain grew ‘nutrition-wise’ or wise in nutrition.

 

The above is obvious, but is it? We know that pregnant women crave certain odd foods and that can only be because the body requires certain nutritional elements and informs the brain which tells the mind to eat certain foods that it associates with certain nutritional needs (the eighth sense). This ability is to be expected and built into our brain from the earliest times and is passed on through survival of the fittest. This is a consequence of the Laws of Life that when competition is extreme, only those animals that could get the minimum (required) nutrition from the minimum amount of food would survive. But, that minimum nutrition had to be sufficient for every part of the animal, and the animals that could best select the required nutrients would survive best, and that sense is heritable.

 

That is a nice derivation of the Mathematics of the Mind, but what of the prediction? So it is a survival instinct that I have called the seventh sense that changes the thinking of the animal as the neurotoxins (in the brain, which are phytotoxins in the plant) of the brain change as the phytotoxins in the food change, and the variety of the food changes with weather, temperature, animal competition etc.

 

So, phytotoxins are necessary, and that means that we, in modern times, should eat none or a minimum of processed food, maximizing natural fresh food otherwise our mind is not being informed by its food. Even worse, the modern diet lacks variety and the mind cannot function well because it is ‘naive’. What of the habit of adding herbs and spices, which were suppose to add taste? Taking the above further to answer this question, I would suggest that they are a remnant of the variety of foods that went into the pot when food was scarce. Were the herbs and spices, extra food, or to improve taste, a medicine or tonic, or to promote the seventh and eighth senses etc.

 

This is a very important point, just as each new fact goes into making the mind more creative, so the food elements educate the mind in a nutritional sense (the seventh and eighth senses).

 

(10) A companion: I have heard that an optimist lives, on average, seven years longer than a pessimist and I can imagine that the mental state can influence length of life. Similarly, I have heard that married men are happier than singles, and whether these statements are true or not, living a long time on your own is not going to be as pleasant as a shared life.

 

The solutions, and the resulting predictions, are more likely to be more useful if they pop up from different starting points. One such is super-eusociality and the Forever Club that provide an entrance to restarting evolution. People that act on the contents of this book are likely to be superior and, being superior might attract a companion, and that companion would make a long life more interesting. Truly, a ‘web’ of life that, if understood, should make our time on this earth longer, more comfortable, useful, enjoyable etc.

 

(11) The brain, body and exercise.

 

The body is designed to be autonomous and to do as much as possible on its own leaving the mind in overall charge of integrating its position in the ‘scheme of things’, and to do this, it has a complex set of ganglions and brains throughout the body.

 

It is said that you never forget how to ride a bicycle and it takes some time to become proficient because new ganglions have to be set up, especially the ‘countervailing’ or counter-balancing connections. The same occurs with learning a new dance step because young people pick it up quickly, whereas old people, more slowly. I wonder if older people really take longer if they use the anti aging procedures?

 

Other examples are driving a car or a repetitive chore like gardening. I now, have changed my mind about the fact that ‘multi-tasking’ by the human mind is possible. In fact, I often do my best creative thinking when driving or pruning in gardens. The autonomous nervous system takes over, and I hold a thought in my mind and suddenly the mind ‘flits’ around the subject and ‘digests’ the content and often something unexpected ‘falls’ out.

 

It sits comfortably in my ming that this effect is the ultimate aim of the mind/body. A grazing animal will be eating, chewing, watching for predators, looking for the preferred food, watching rivals etc. We have evolved to never stop evolving! The more that you learn, the more creative you become, the more successful you become and the more likely to survive and the more progeny you will leave behind.

 

So, what is the result? The more that you exercise, the ‘better’ the food that you consume and the more stimulated the brain, the higher your level of componentization and the more progeny that you are likely to leave behind and this is (one of ) the links between the first and second Laws of Life.

 

postscript: Earlier a quotation was given that the mind affects the brain and the brain affects the mind. Once we understand how the mind is formed and functions, the brain learns, more dendrites are created and the mind uses these circuits to boost the creativeness of the mind. Thus creativity is enhanced, but the longer that the brain lives, the higher the creativity, and that is the purpose (that I am suggesting) of length of life, combined with exercise and nutrition. Possibly many very good minds are wasted because they didn’t have the necessary nutrition and exercise as they grew older. This is the point of the above, and suggests that it is a waste to retire and allow all that knowledge (from a lifetime) to wither.