In Our Prime (4 page)

The second theme concerns the tension between self-help's ability to empower or manipulate us. The market has largely co-opted the vibrant tradition of personal improvement to draw its own version of the middle-aged face and body, to set midlife priorities and produce a sense of security or anxiety. The overt message of advertisements is that you, too, can have a middle age that is vital, innovative, sexy, and fun, but underneath lies the implicit threat that a failure to take advantage of proffered enhancements will leave you unhealthy, unwanted, unsexy, and unemployable.

Before the twentieth century, men and women were often seen as reaching the height of their power and influence in their 40s and 50s. When middle age grew into a subject of popular conversation after the Civil War, an orchestra of voices offered comments and assessments. Descriptions of middle age as the prime of life were as common as depictions of it as old-fashioned and stale.

By the 1920s, science and business had seized the discourse and defined middle age primarily as a biological phenomenon as opposed to a psychological or spiritual one. Factory work favored the young for their speed and stamina, while businesses created an array of products from smoothing creams to cereals that promised to help customers mimic an idealized youth. Midlife was narrowly measured in terms of productivity and youthful beauty. In this context, middle age became a powerful metaphor for decline—one that has remained with us.

In the fifties and sixties, psychologists “rediscovered” middle age and recast it as a psychological stage of human development. For the first time, social science researchers considered midlife to be a significant period in which positive change was possible, but they also burdened it with psychic maladies.
Middle age was an unavoidable
“passage,” to use the term Gail Sheehy popularized in her 1974 blockbuster book. “A sense of stagnation, disequilibrium, and depression is predictable as we enter the passage to midlife,” she wrote, when we are obsessed with our own death.

By the mid-1970s, a handful of researchers recognized that this definition, too, was wanting. The cultural revolutions that the sixties launched into orbit were settling into place, and the neat series of life stages carefully lined up like dominoes—childhood, adolescence, middle and old age—were toppled as women in great numbers entered or returned to college classrooms, joined the workforce, and delayed or rejected marriage and children. Divorce, single parenthood, cohabiting gay and straight adults, and frequent job shifts were all on the rise.
As researchers attempted to redefine
midlife to take account of these novel circumstances, they ended up transforming the way human development as a whole was studied. Stage theories were nudged aside by a more comprehensive perspective that emphasized development as a lifelong process continually shaped and pounded by physical, mental, historical, and economic changes.

The idea of middle age has shifted position in the popular imagination as baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) reached their 40s, 50s, and 60s and as Gen Xers (born between 1965 and 1980) followed close behind. The association of midlife with deterioration and torpor is still
strong, but a growing countercultural story that emphasizes more positive affiliations is gaining momentum.

Today, we exist in a world of multiple middle ages. We each have a personal midpoint molded by individual experience, a generational midpoint determined by the historical era of our birth, and a huge cultural storeroom of off-the-rack middle ages offered by Hollywood and marketers. Varieties of middle age also depend on whether we graduated from high school or college, work as janitors or bankers, use the women's or men's room, and live in rural Texas or downtown Chicago.

Our ability to defy biological, social, and psychological clocks and construct a more enriched version of middle age has never been greater. Yet instead of re-creating middle age, this generation is trying to disown it. Americans haven't abandoned their youthful infatuations. The contemporary ideal of beauty continues to spurn mature voluptuousness, thickening waists, and wrinkles, and glorifies ice-cream-stick figures and whipped-butter complexions. Middle-aged men and women are applauded for their ability to simulate the attributes of those twenty to thirty years younger rather than for their experience and wisdom. A successful midlife has become equated with an imitation of youth.

There is a more capacious conception of middle age, one that contradicts itself and “contains multitudes,” as Walt Whitman put it in “Song of Myself” when he was on the cusp of middle age, “in perfect health begin, / Hoping to cease not till death.” This middle age recognizes the inevitable loss of youth and a foreshortened future, but it also celebrates a deeper well of experience and insight, and takes advantage of an expanded buffet of prospects. Middle age takes many forms. Men and women of a certain age push strollers, drop the kids off at college, embark on world tours, and take up pole dancing. They forsake basketball for golf, pack away the small sizes, fill prescriptions for Lipitor, try and fail and try again to give up fatty foods; they take care of their grandchildren, leave jobs, switch careers, get fired, marry for the first (or second or third) time, strike out on their own after a divorce, or avoid matrimony altogether. They are the anchor point for children, new graduates, and aging parents.

Think of the word “meridian” and its manifold meanings. It can refer
to one of the many imaginary lines that circle the globe from north to south, dividing it in half, and it can denote the high point or peak of one's powers. Middle age is like a meridian: it was imagined into existence, it can create a legion of pathways, and it marks a time when we are in our prime.

Thomas Cole's 1840 painting
Voyage of Life: Manhood

Surprisingly little attention has been
given to the middle years, which, for most individuals, constitute the longest segment of life.

—Midlife in the United States national study (2004)

I
f you want to get a sense of what middle age in the twenty-first century looks like, a good place to start is the Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where Richard Davidson is conducting research into the middle-aged brain. The $10 million lab, which Davidson helped found and now
directs, is in the Waisman Center at the western end of campus. On the day of my visit, groves of upturned brown dirt with cranes and plows stand about like muddied yellow dinosaurs. A maze of concrete barriers, orange cones, and netting divide the beige-and-aqua-colored center from the surrounding construction sites.

Outside it is hot and moist, but in the windowless room where I'm lying, waiting for my brain scan, it is cold enough for a blanket.

“Comfortable?”

The voice travels through layers of stuffing, as if I were the pea under the princess's sixteen mattresses. In my ears are two squashed yellow foam plugs, like mini marshmallows, covered by DJ-sized padded earphones. The lyrics “Ground Control to Major Tom” from David Bowie's song “Space Oddity” suddenly pop into my head as I lean back into a clear plastic pillow filled with tiny white balls the size of peppercorns. With the turn of a valve, Michael, the lab technician, has suctioned the air out of the pillow so that the plastic encases my skull like a bonnet. Two rectangular foam pads are pushed against the top of my scalp, a further bulwark against the slightest wiggle. Even a millimeter shift will distort the scans of my brain that are produced by the large beige functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine I'm about to enter.

“Remember, don't move,” Michael tells me.

Nikki Rute, the study coordinator for Davidson's research on the middle-aged brain, has already given me a practice run of the procedure in another room with a computer screen and a facsimile of the machine, a square contraption shaped like the mouth of a cave with a narrow tube through the center. The Potemkin apparatus is a way to familiarize the 331 subjects who are participating in Davidson's experiments with what will happen when they are in the real fMRI and are expected to lie motionless on their backs for two to three hours. Davidson plans to use the pictures he takes to investigate how the architecture and circuitry of the middle-aged brain affect emotional control. Some tests have shown that in younger adults the amygdala, the brain's emotional nut, located deep within the temporal lobe, is activated when exposed to both upsetting and uplifting images. Adults in their middle and upper decades, by contrast, seem to have the ability to screen out or tamp down negative
emotions; their amygdalae light up when they see positive images but ignore the disturbing ones. Davidson wants to find out more about this filtering action.

Before I enter the real brain scanner, Michael swings over a bulky set of goggles similar to those eye doctors use to adjust prescriptions. The lenses are close enough to brush my eyelashes. Michael puts my right hand around the control box and I place my fingers lightly on top of the three buttons.

“Remember, there is no right or wrong answer. Rely on your first impressions,” Nikki says. “Don't think too much.”

Then I slide into the tunnel.

Nikki had warned me it would be loud. Even through my shrink-wrapped head, I can hear the relentless clanging, like the backhoes slowly pounding away at the construction site outside. Through the lenses, a parade of small headshots against a royal blue background appear. Anonymous Tom, Dick, and Harrys. Bald, curly-headed, mustachioed; 20-something, 40-something, 60-something men; oval- and moon-faced, blue-eyed and brown. No impish grins or curled lips, no furrowed brows or flared nostrils. They could have been posing for a driver's license. “Please evaluate how much you think you would like the person in the photo,” the printed directions instruct. Under my right hand is the control box with buttons, which I use to register my sentiments on a scale directly beneath each photo from “very much dislike” all the way across to “very much like.” The faces make no more of an impression than a passerby during the lunchtime rush. For nearly every one, I leave the cursor dead center—no one's face moves me one way or the other.

Next comes another series of photographs. Once again I use the button box, pressing my forefinger for negative, middle finger for neutral, and ring finger for positive. Every so often a man's headshot will appear again, but this time I am not supposed to press any buttons while it is displayed.

The photographs whiz by every couple of seconds: a group white-water rafting; a corpse buried in a pit; a woman stuffing her mouth with potato chips; a crashed car. Positive. Negative. Negative. Negative.

Another headshot appears, one of the expressionless men.

Inside the machine, a doughnut-shaped magnet produces an electromagnetic field that passes through my body, stimulating hydrogen atoms that give off radio signals. These signals are then collected by a special scanner and turned into images that Nikki and Michael can watch on a monitor in the other room. Though I don't press any buttons, they can see where the most neural activity is occurring—where the lights go on in my brain.

Measuring someone's emotional resilience is tricky. It's not as if you can scan a person's brain the moment she is getting fired or he is dumped by a girlfriend. For his midlife research, Davidson and his team had to devise an experiment to capture emotional responses. The series of photographs I was shown, some gruesome and sad, others uplifting and funny, were designed to do just that.

These images help to make up the International Affective Pictures System, or IAPS, a series of color slides that serve as a standard reference for measuring subtle shifts in emotion. Through the years, hundreds of volunteers have looked at and rated the images—cemeteries, starving children, serene sunsets, a coiled snake, a couple kissing, bunnies—on a scale from pleasant to unpleasant and calm to excited. The images that elicited the most uniform responses—whether positive, negative, or neutral—from a broad range of people were selected for the IAPS series.

You expect someone to respond negatively to pictures of hungry children, mutilated bodies, or wrecked homes. But what Davidson and his team were interested in was the duration of the negative reaction. Are you able to quickly shut off the spigot of bad feelings or do they drip into your view of other things, inciting a negative response to an image that you might otherwise view benignly? That is the purpose of the Tom-Dick-and-Harry headshots I was shown, those variously aged men with blank expressions. Let's say you are neutral, as I was, about these images. What happens when you see the same face repeatedly flashed right after looking at photographs of a cadaver buried in mud, a hypodermic needle stuck into a pile of feces, or a crashed car? Is there a hangover from the negative photographs that influences your judgment and causes you to rate those completely unremarkable faces more negatively than before?
What about the positive photographs? Do they also have a hangover effect? As Davidson and his team track the electrical activity in a subject's brain, they also examine the brain's anatomy and measure pulse rate, blood pressure, bone density, and cortisol levels, an indicator of stress. They want to find out if people who have the most difficulty containing their negative emotions also have the most ailments. Just as someone with high blood pressure can reduce the risk of heart disease with early treatment, Davidson wants to test whether learning to control stress can reduce the risk of hypertension, type 2 diabetes, atherosclerosis, and other stress-related maladies. He thinks the answer is yes. The more quickly someone can recover from a negative experience—whether witnessing an accident or getting bawled out by the boss—the better one's physical health will be.