How to Improve Your Memory & Cognitive Function at Any Age | Dr. Alan Castel | Andrew Huberman Transcript

Andrew Huberman interviews UCLA memory researcher Dr Alan Castel on improving and preserving cognitive function across the lifespan

Andrew Huberman speaks with Dr Alan Castel, professor of psychology at UCLA and one of the world's leading experts on human memory and cognitive aging.

Summary

Andrew Huberman interviews Dr Alan Castel about how memory works, what determines what we remember and forget, and how cognitive function changes across the lifespan. Castel argues that memory decline with age is far from inevitable or uniform — some memory systems remain stable or even improve, and factors like physical exercise, social connection, curiosity, and attitude toward aging itself are powerful determinants of cognitive health. A central theme is that good learning requires difficulty and error, not ease — the brain changes only when there is a gap between current and desired performance. Castel also presents research on "superagers" — older adults whose memory rivals people decades younger — and identifies the ABCs of successful aging: Attitude, Balance, and Connection. He draws on interviews with figures including John Wooden to illustrate how purpose, love, and balance underpin cognitive and emotional wellbeing in later life.

Key Takeaways

FULL TRANSCRIPT

What Memory Is and How It Works

Andrew Huberman: Dr Alan Castel, welcome.

Dr Alan Castel: Thank you. Nice to be here.

Andrew Huberman: You're going to tell us how to build up and keep our memory. But let's start by asking: what is memory? Or rather, how do you conceptualize memory from the standpoint of moving through life, experiencing things — let's call it passively — or trying to remember certain things? What determines what information we hold on to, and for how long?

Dr Alan Castel: It's a great question. Memory is really a mental representation of the past, and by its very nature it's reconstructive. It's never always accurate, and I think that's why it's so mysterious and fascinating — that you and I can see the same event and then remember it differently a week or a day later. It starts almost at the sensory level, and sometimes our mind plays tricks on us. That's how I got interested in this field: how can I think I know something and yet not know it as well as I do? This is something called metacognition — awareness of our own cognition.

As a personal anecdote, when I was in fifth or sixth grade, I had one line in the play The Wizard of Oz. It's a line I practiced again and again: "Listen everyone, there's a cyclone on the way. Hurry and get into the cellar." And of course, on opening night: "Listen everyone, there's a cellar on the way. Hurry and get into the cyclone."

Andrew Huberman: Nice.

Dr Alan Castel: And I was thinking, how did I manage that? Having memorized this line, most of the audience probably didn't even notice. But that to me was an early exposure to the idea that memory is not always a function of what you do with the information.

Then in high school I had another exposure to memory where I just memorized a lot of things. That got me pretty far in algebra and chemistry. In fact, I almost memorized the entire periodic table — using mnemonics, little rhymes or songs. But I realized in my first year of college that I really didn't have a strong understanding of chemistry, even though I could use all these terms. Thankfully, I took an introductory psychology class and realized people studied learning and memory, false memories, why memory can and cannot be accurate. I was hooked. I found that so fascinating and I still do today.

Andrew Huberman: I'm both impressed and intrigued to ask more about memorization of the periodic table. First question is about mnemonics and ways that we try to batch and learn information by pairing it to other things — trying to remember a room full of people's names, pairing the first letter of their name with a fruit, things like that. To me, that seems like a very inefficient way to learn because you're adding more information that you need to store away. Is that the best way to learn large batches of information?

Dr Alan Castel: I think it's almost a workaround. And that's the first problem people raise — "I can't remember names." By their nature, names used to be descriptive of a person's occupation. Someone's a baker, we call them Mr. Baker. But that's evolved with time. I tell people: if you can't remember someone's name, that's probably natural forgetting, but you remember if you had an interesting conversation, or if you can trust them — that's probably more important.

To engage our knowledge base so that we can remember names, we need to make this arbitrary link. I tell people my last name is Castel — Castel rhymes with pastel, and my grandfather used pastels, let's say. So people can make this link. But like you say, that's effortful. It takes time away from the essence of what else we could be talking about. And it leads to predictable memory errors — people say, "Oh, I remember his name was Pastel," when in fact it's Castel.

So I think we have to almost trick our memory into remembering things that might be somewhat arbitrary. That becomes more pronounced as we get older. There are more Davids, more Andrews, and there's just more interference. To get around that, we have to use deliberate practice, retrieval practice, use the name several times. But I tell my students whose names I often forget that I'll still remember topics we've talked about, or how they felt about something. And I think that's more important than sometimes just remembering a name.

Andrew Huberman: To remember chemistry or some other subject that involves nomenclature — not everyday terms unless you're a chemist — but to really understand the deeper mechanics of that thing and remember it: I want to say, and I'm not a memory researcher, that it might be helpful to think in terms of verbs, not labels. So rather than thinking about a particular element just in terms of its name, think about how it interacts with something else, or how it gives or receives a charge under certain conditions.

Dr Alan Castel: Absolutely. I think what you're looking for is deeper learning, deeper semantic learning. This has been referred to as levels of processing. I was working at a very low level of processing when I was making up "Happy Henry" for hydrogen and helium. But if you can start to visualize things or interact with them — that's why we want chemistry labs, places where you engage with the material. I found chemistry very abstract. I think that's why I didn't really engage with it. But I found psychology to be something we were interacting with every day. I was making these memory errors. I saw my parents and grandparents remembering and forgetting things and I thought, how does that happen?

The brain is so complex that I don't think we'll ever completely understand why a particular memory error might happen. But this awareness is really important, and a lot of good learning happens through making mistakes. I play piano and I struggle, but I know when I make a mistake I'm going to have to work on it. I see that with my children. You learn a lot by making mistakes.

That also illustrates how our memory works. Just seeing something many times doesn't mean you'll remember it well. This is a classic demonstration — you've seen a penny many times, but you don't remember all the features on the penny. I've updated that to the Apple logo. You've seen the Apple logo so many times. Of course you know all the features. But then when you quiz people and test them — and I do this in my class — people aren't sure: is the bite on the left or the right hand side? Is there a stem or a leaf?

But if you make people draw it while they're looking at it, they're going to remember it better.

Andrew Huberman: While they're looking at the actual logo?

Dr Alan Castel: While they're looking at it. Or actually, the best way to remember something is through failures. I'll have you draw it without looking at it, and you're struggling — wait, is it on the left or right? Is it a stem or a leaf? You're starting to question all of these things. Then when you look at the logo again, you're going to engage in better learning than if you hadn't done that errorful trial beforehand.

Andrew Huberman: Even if you don't redraw it correctly?

Dr Alan Castel: Exactly. In an academic setting, we don't want failure — we want people to do well. But retrieval failure with some corrective feedback is really beneficial. That's kind of how you learn through life. You make mistakes and then you correct them. But if you're constantly just doing it the right way, you're not really noticing these features.

We've tried to extend this to other domains. It's called habituation — you stop noticing things around you, like where the nearest fire extinguisher is. I guarantee hopefully there's one somewhere nearby, and you've probably walked by it many times, but you stop noticing it. It's only when you need it that you realize, wait, where is it? So we've done this study where instead of me telling you where it is, you have to get up and find it. Now you're engaging with the environment, you're going to go look for it and be like, "Gosh, it's been there the whole time. I've walked by it so many times and never noticed it."

I think that's the difference between seeing something and noticing it. We know a lot of information reaches the retina, but then how much of it reaches our more conscious level? Not all of it does. And I think that's what makes psychology interesting.

Learning, Mistakes, and the Role of Mindset

Andrew Huberman: The big revelation for me when learning about neuroplasticity — and it was such an obvious one once I heard it — was that if you can perform a mental or physical task, there's no reason for your brain to change. You clearly already have the circuit. So it's the gap between desired performance and current performance that actually triggers the opportunity for plasticity.

Dr Alan Castel: And those can be uncomfortable positions, right? Where it's like, I don't know this. Am I going to be able to learn it? And that's the metacognitive aspect — when are you aware of that? A lot of learning now is unsupervised. It's not that you're going into classrooms and teachers are telling you what to do. You want to learn a new instrument, you might do a lot of it on YouTube. You want to learn a new language, there's going to be a lot of trial and error. I think the best learners are the ones who persist, who are curious, because that's how you're going to get a lot of feedback — asking not just lots of questions, but the right questions.

Andrew Huberman: The frustration and agitation — I do believe that's the release of catecholamines, epinephrine, norepinephrine, and those change the milieu around synapses and allow them to change. All the things that we want to avoid are the things that actually allow us to learn. It could be that people who are very good at learning and have this willingness to embrace a so-called beginner's mind — they're excellent in one domain and perfectly happy to be a raw beginner in a different domain — I always wonder if they experience agitation the same way anyone else would, but they don't have the same relationship to it. Like, "Oh, here's that autonomic arousal again." Maybe they don't conceptualize it as frustration.

So in terms of getting better at learning and remembering things, have you or any other laboratories parsed people's framework around it? I know there's a vast literature around growth mindset, but I'm thinking more in terms of how people think about their own levels of frustration. Because if you go, "Oh, here I am frustrated again — awesome, let's go, now's the opportunity," versus, "I'm terrible at this, I know I should push through" — I wonder whether mindset can actually make a difference.

Dr Alan Castel: I think it can. I think our goals can play a big role. A lot of the learning we do is sometimes learning to take a test, or learning something because it'll be on a test. But as we get through life, we realize we're interested in bird watching or music or skateboarding. A lot of this is going to be observational learning, talking to other people. So I think it comes down to curiosity, which is almost closing this knowledge gap — here I am, but I want to be here. How can I get from here to there? There's a strong motivation there.

That's something we've started to study with older adults as well, because we know memory declines happen with age, but not all things change equally. In fact, there are certain memory systems that might actually remain stable or even improve. And I think some of the keys here are curiosity, being interested in listening to a podcast, talking to someone else, closing that knowledge gap, and then extending that further.

I sometimes find there are topics I'm not so interested in, but then there are some that I'll almost become obsessive about — I'm going to watch that YouTube video and the next one and the next one, and 45 minutes later... I think that can be a waste of time in some ways, but it shows that our brain is craving this information. And that's something I'm really curious about — how that will change as we get older. Some of our research suggests that as we get older, we're more selective about what we focus on. And I think that can be beneficial. Maybe you don't waste as much time trying to learn everything, but you're more focused on the things you want to learn about.

Andrew Huberman: Do we know that it's important to continue to seek out new information as we get older in order to maintain our memory? Or is it sufficient to just make some effort to remember the past and what we need to do to get through our day? How hard should people push to learn new information as opposed to maintaining what they've got?

Dr Alan Castel: I think it's a little bit of both, and you want to have that balance. If you play piano, my father in his 80s and 90s still plays piano. I don't think he's learning new pieces, but he's strengthening the pieces he knows, and that keeps him sharp. On the other hand, being exposed to new things — if you're traveling, if you're talking to different people — that can be really important for things like neurogenesis. You want to develop new brain cells, which we know doesn't just stop as we reach a certain age.

So it's probably a bit of both. People ask me, "What's the best thing to keep my brain sharp — is it crossword puzzles?" That's interesting because as we get older, our actual verbal knowledge is maintained, if not improved. So in a way you're strengthening a strength, and I think that can be beneficial. But probably the other things to do are to do new things — go outside and appreciate the birds, talk to someone who has a different perspective, go to a different restaurant even. All of these things I find, as I get older, I have a lot of routines. But it's when I start to violate these routines — take a different way to work, try something different at a restaurant — I can almost feel like, wow, that was a different experience today.

I think both are really important.

Habits, Routines, and the Value of Novelty

Andrew Huberman: We do get set in our ways. That's a real thing. Habits can be healthy, and we can talk more about that because those routines — I drove this way and I didn't get into a car accident. I even notice my students in my classes, after the first couple of weeks, they all sit in the same seats. I'm always like, why is that? And it's like, well, I didn't get attacked by a snake here, so it's safe. Maybe evolutionarily it makes sense.

Dr Alan Castel: But I'll sometimes halfway through the quarter say, "Okay, I want everyone to get up and switch sides and sit somewhere else." And students are like, "This is terrible. I have to move." But there's some benefit to having a different perspective — both physically and possibly mentally — in that you're going to remember things differently. And I know if I've taken a class in a different classroom every year, I can almost revisit each of those rooms and try to recall what I learned. But if you learn all in the same spot, there's a lot of interference. So there can be benefits to changing our habits, but it can be uncomfortable, especially at first.

I went to a lot of scientific meetings early in my career and I would change seats after every break. It was the only way I could stay awake through all the talks. Some talks would naturally keep me awake and some just wouldn't. Later in my career, I gave myself permission to get up and take a walk. I do think one learns differently even if you just change the novelty of seat position.

Andrew Huberman: And I think that's a great example of how, as you've gotten older and more experienced, you give yourself the leeway — "Hey, I can get up if this isn't working for me." But you've also learned you learn better if you sit over here and then over here. And when you have this metacognitive insight, you can use it effectively. I've seen that with my children — sometimes learning through mistakes, sometimes realizing this works better for me.

It's interesting that almost everybody has an experience of saying something stupid or getting the wrong answer publicly, and the shame and the arousal that comes with that means we're never going to forget the right answer. But we tend to remember the experience of embarrassment more than the information itself. It sort of swamps the information somehow. And it raises this question: is there a slight to severe emotional tag on every memory we have?

Dr Alan Castel: I think the part of our brain like the amygdala, which is involved in processing emotions, is very active and is maintained throughout age. It's other parts of the brain that tend to decline. So I think you're right that there can be an emotional attachment to a lot of our memories. Some of them are bittersweet. Some of them are things we go back to for comfort. Sometimes we even change them a little bit so they fit the way we might have thought they happened.

And that can be at large. That's part of our emotional tuning — what makes us feel good. Some memories we don't want to revisit. With PTSD, there's a lot of research on how we can try to help people. So I think memory can be tuned that way, and a lot of it can have an emotional valence. Those are usually the memories that we cherish, or the ones that we might be afraid of.

I still remember — even though I'm not sure I remember it accurately — that Wizard of Oz moment. And now when my daughter was in Wizard of Oz, I was like, "Oh, this is such a great play." I was thinking positively about it, even though at that time I got the line wrong.

Andrew Huberman: What do you think happened there?

Dr Alan Castel: I was probably just distracted. You do a lot of dress rehearsals, and you don't see the audience. You don't appreciate what's going on. Especially when you're young — all of a sudden there are all these people watching me. I know what I'm supposed to say, but I'm not convinced most people even remembered it. I'm not even sure my parents were there.

So I think we then think of it as a very strong emotional memory, but it guides us. To me, that's a lasting memory in a sense because it kind of forced me to think, how does memory really work? I thought I knew how it worked.

I see a lot of people studying in ways that aren't always as effective. We know some of the work — colleagues at UCLA studied desirable difficulties: how can you make learning kind of uncomfortable, but such that you'll remember things better? It goes against a lot of our intuitions. A lot of teachers want to say, "How can we make learning easier?" And I think that's probably the first problem — you don't want it to be easy. You want it to be not a struggle, but a challenge, so that you can appreciate just how difficult it is.

Visual Memory, Photography, and Selective Encoding

Andrew Huberman: I don't have a photographic memory — I wish I did, or maybe I wish I didn't. But a long time ago I decided — I was in a really cool circumstance, I was on a picnic, I think it was my first girlfriend — and I remember thinking, "Gosh, she's so beautiful. I'm just going to take a picture." We were sitting at this park up in the hills behind where I used to live. And I just decided, okay, I'm going to remember this picture. Now, of course, in my mind it's blurry. I don't remember specific details, but I remember more or less the angle, the scene.

And then like a year and a half ago, I was in Manhattan in an Uber, and I just thought, maybe I could just do that for a trivial street scene. There was one of those scaffolds for construction and a guy walking by, and I'm like, I wonder if I'll remember it. And I still remember it.

Now the question I have is: do I actually remember the content of what I saw — besides just the crude scaffold, the guy — or is what's stamped in my memory my decision to do that, the conscious collection of it? These weren't big emotionally salient events. The difference between these visual memories and other visual memories is that the emotional load wasn't that high, but I made the decision to do it. It was coming from me.

I don't have a visual picture of my prom, but the prom was also a lot more emotionally laden than anything I just described. Does that make sense?

Dr Alan Castel: Yeah, it's a fascinating question, because I think selection is the important thing here — you're making a conscious decision that this is a special moment. Can I just take a picture of it?

The work on visual memory is interesting. We are very visual people, but the research on photographic memory does show that even people who have very strong visual memory will make memory errors. So it's not exactly photographic, but their visual memory is exceptional.

What's interesting here — and I think this is important — is the selection process. You're choosing: this is a special moment, I'm going to time-stamp it and remember it. You're not doing anything special other than realizing a lot is going on. Now there's probably some emotional valence there, versus taking this random picture in New York City.

It would be interesting to test your memory later, because we know sometimes we think we remember something well and in fact we misremember things or details. Hopefully you got the right girlfriend, of course, but maybe the hill looks a little bit different. Sometimes people are like, "Of course it was spring because we went to the prom," but actually it was a different season entirely.

I think that's important especially as we get older. These days we have our phones for everything, so people are offloading information — "I'm not going to remember this, I'll take a picture." There is some research showing that the act of deciding to take the picture actually improves your own memory for the event.

Andrew Huberman: Interesting.

Dr Alan Castel: Now, it can also make your memory worse, because you're realizing, "I'm taking this photo so I don't need to remember it later." So you could see it going both ways. But that selection process is important. Sometimes you're choosing, "This is mundane, I'm going to offload it and take a picture," or "This is a special moment, I want to take this picture." I see it when I take pictures of my family — this is a special moment, I want to take this photo. But there are times where I'm like, I don't have my camera, I don't want to interfere. This is going to be an internal memory that I can take, and hopefully it lasts forever.

Andrew Huberman: I tell myself that my mindset at the time was: this is a special moment, I never want to forget this.

Dr Alan Castel: Well, memory is reconstructive, and the more you retrieve it and go back there, the more you'll have this feeling of remembering it. And our brain does a lot of interesting things in terms of reconstructing the past — it also has a similar brain signature as imagining the future. In some ways that makes sense. We shouldn't have separate parts of the brain for thinking about the past and thinking about the future. But that can predict why you might misremember something. Your imagination has to be based on the experiences you've had already. If I say, "What would it be like to go to Mars?" — you've never been to Mars, but you've seen movies about it. If I said, "Imagine a space alien," you and I, being similar in age, are probably going to think of the ET version, whereas someone younger might have a very different representation.

So it's interesting to think of memory as a reconstruction of the past, but also imagining the future involves our past experiences.

Memory, Eyewitness Testimony, and the Fallibility of Confidence

Andrew Huberman: Never thought about it that way. It's the perfect time, I think, to raise a quote that a former guest on this podcast put on social media the other day. They weren't his words, but this was Morgan Housel, who did a really wonderful episode on the psychology of money. He put out what he said was a Russian quote: "The past is more unpredictable than the future." That raises questions about eyewitness testimony, spousal arguments...

Do we remember things the way they happened, or do we confabulate — do we muck it all up?

Dr Alan Castel: I don't think we muck it all up, and I don't think we do it intentionally either. But as a result of all the information we have in our memory, we're constantly interpreting the future and our current state. Eyewitness memory is a really good example of that. Something horrible might have happened, and like your experience where you think you're taking a photo and you're going to remember everything — it feels like you will. "I can remember the shirt. I can remember the smell. I can remember the weather." And sometimes that can be accurate, but a lot of research shows that sometimes we misremember these things.

In some of these classic cases, now that there's DNA evidence, you can determine that maybe they got the wrong person. When that happens, you want to look back and say, how could that happen? And some of it comes down to faulty eyewitness identification. These are not cases where people are lying or intentionally changing things. They'll identify someone and say, "That's the person." And as a result of identifying that person in a lineup, that person then replaces what they actually saw. So our memory can be contaminated, just like any form of evidence could be contaminated. Then when you replay it again, you're replaying the person you identified, not the person you actually saw.

Andrew Huberman: Wow. So it's almost like as we become more familiar with this person that we identified, our knowledge about them — facial features, etc. — is elaborated in our brain, and we superimpose that on the actual experience.

Dr Alan Castel: Yeah. And this is — you know, one of the most famous cases is the Ronald Cotton case, where a really horrible event happened. The woman made a point of trying to remember her attacker. So it wasn't just a quick glance — she had a long interaction with him. That's a traumatic event. She said, "If I survive this, I want to remember his face so I can identify him later." So this is the perfect situation where your memory should be sharp.

And it was a cross-race identification, which we know is not as reliable as identifying someone of your own race. When she saw a lineup, she took her time and said, "This feels like it's a multiple-choice test, and I studied hard for it." She took her time and identified the person. She thought in her mind, "This is the person who was inches from my throat." He had an alibi that didn't stand up, and he was found guilty. It was only decades later that DNA evidence exonerated him.

She felt horrible. She felt like — and there are a lot of reasons why this could happen, whether leading questions or how the identification process was conducted — but she was trying to do what she felt was her job, and take someone who she thought was guilty off the street. Later, they actually got to meet, and she could apologize to him. She felt terrible.

So this is one case study, and I wouldn't draw any sweeping conclusions, but it had a lot of the principles we've talked about: you feel like you're taking a photo, it's a cross-race identification where your confidence might be high for good reason but accuracy might not be, and then this changing of the face — once you identify the face, that's what you start to remember.

Andrew Huberman: How does the legal system deal with this kind of thing? I mean, nowadays there are so many more cameras and phones which can track location. I like to think those things have improved the courtroom scenarios — it's harder for people to make genuine mistakes.

Dr Alan Castel: I think memory should be treated as one source of evidence, just like DNA, just like any sort of evidence. But we also need to be aware that it can be contaminated, just like any other source of evidence. We can't just say, "Well, DNA evidence is perfect." Well, it can also be contaminated in predictable ways.

Coming back to this idea of metacognition — most people feel like they have a pretty good understanding of how memory works, but it's not always accurate. Sometimes high confidence doesn't necessarily mean high accuracy. And I think part of the reason we're fooled is that usually, the more you see something, the better you'll remember it — just like the Apple logo. But that's not always the case, and there are predictable reasons why. The more you see something, the more you might stop attending to its features. So that is a more predictable memory principle. But we don't always have accurate metacognitive insight. And I think that's both concerning — in the eyewitness memory case — but also important for learning. How can we maximize our learning?

Everyday Memory, Forgetting, and Survival

Andrew Huberman: I have a question about what I want to call medium-term memory. I don't even know if that's a real term. But there's this thing that I do — when I check into hotels, I always look at the map of how to get out in a fire. Because once, staying at a hotel in San Francisco for a donor event, the alarm went off in the middle of the night. Everyone stuck their head out to see if anyone was leaving, and everyone was like, "We're not leaving." Then they called everyone's room. It was an actual fire, which taught me: when the alarm goes, go.

It was pretty confusing. Wide hallways, the exit sign was not pointing to the actual stairwell. Not a good situation. But of course, got out fine. From now on, before I go to sleep, I go and I look at the "you are here" map. I look for the exit. I occasionally walk the hall. I make a mental map. Okay, so let's assume it's smoky. I would go right, then left, right, then left, right. Okay, I drill it in my head.

And I go to sleep. I never remember the maps, but it's not working memory, it's not short-term memory. I couldn't tell you for the life of me what the last hotel map looked like. But thank goodness I don't remember, because it's going to change every time I'm in a different hotel. What term of memory is that? And what are the mechanisms that allow for selective forgetting that's healthy?

Dr Alan Castel: I think when you're saying medium-term, that's your everyday basic memory function — you need to remember things, but you don't think you need to remember them that long. You really need to remember them tonight, and it makes you sleep better.

I've had a similar experience. I was staying in a hotel with my family and the fire alarm went off. We're like, "What do we do?" We know we don't take the elevator. I looked down the hall and I swear I saw smoke. So we went down the other way, rushed down the stairs, got outside. The kids were pretty traumatized. Actually, one of our children was like eight stories ahead of us going down the stairs. But what's interesting is I thought I saw smoke — maybe I didn't have my glasses on — but that's my mind playing tricks on me.

I think this everyday memory is really relevant. When you're studying that map, you're making notes: it's close by, it's down the hall, I've got to go down here. And that can be very informative and useful for survival. There's some research saying that's basically what our brain is tuned towards — surviving. Where am I going to eat? How am I going to sleep?

Part of that memory formation is also then forgetting it and updating it. You need to know your hotel room number when you're staying there. But if I ask you your hotel room number a week later, it's gone. But that's good in a way, because you're going to have other numbers to remember. So there are benefits of forgetting. You're doing some processing to remember something, but then you need to update it and forget it.

I think the best thing you can do in that case is that studying the map is one thing, but some people aren't great with maps. Doing that active learning of actually walking the halls — "I go down here, there's the elevator, so I can't go there. Oh, there are the stairs. I'll remember that." That sort of active learning is like us with the fire extinguisher — we made people get up and find it instead of telling people where it was.

I'm always, you know, when you're on a flight, they'll say there are six emergency exits on this plane. And then I think they do the wrong thing — they tell you where they are. I think the best thing would be to say, "There are six emergency exits on this plane. Go find them." I notice, maybe it's just myself being anxious, but as soon as they say that, I'm looking behind me. I'm making sure I know where they all are. Whereas most people are like, "Oh, they pointed here, here, and here."

So I think that sort of act of learning, whether you call it everyday memory, is really important. And I think when we talk about memory, people are like, "I can't remember names." That's kind of a common thing. But if you need to remember what medication you're taking, or how you reacted the last time you saw this person — those sorts of things are really important. It's important to be in tune with what you're calling this kind of everyday average memory.

High-Stakes Situations and Defaulting to Habit

Andrew Huberman: I believe that under conditions of very high arousal, you just default to whatever was trained, whatever reflexes you have. I had a scuba diving accident years ago — an air failure — and it was a whole mess. You just default to these routines. We had to do the whole share-air thing. It was a precarious situation.

I recently watched what I think is a spectacular documentary about Dean Potter, who was a free solo climber, a predecessor to Alex Honnold. He got into wing suiting and base jumping. There's a scene where people were doing base jumping in Yosemite, advocating for it being legal there — it's illegal. A woman who was a very seasoned base jumper didn't want to use her own gear because they were confiscating people's gear at the bottom. So she borrowed someone else's gear and she jumps. She's used to pulling from a leg pull. And you just see her the whole way down. She's got a parachute on. She put on a different pack. She knew it was a different pull location. But under conditions of very high arousal, even highly trained people just default to whatever it is they're used to doing. And if you don't know what to do, you default to not knowing what to do.

I've had that experience scuba diving. It's very clear from this documentary. And I think we're all a little naive in thinking that when the alarm goes and everything is crazy, I'm going to sort through this in a regimented way. The brain seems to not work that way.

Dr Alan Castel: I think we discover that in these extreme situations, but also in some simple situations. There's a really concerning thing that happens — people will leave infants in the back of their car unattended, and these infants will die on hot days. When you look at these investigations, the reason this happens is that these are very responsible, very intelligent parents who will put their child in the car, get in the car, and then just get into this mode of "I'm going to work, I'm going to do my job." The baby falls asleep, you drive to work, you go upstairs, you do your thing, and then you get this phone call: "Where's your infant? Why haven't they been dropped off?" And you're thinking, what are you talking about?

Andrew Huberman: Whoa.

Dr Alan Castel: Exactly. I'm sure many people listening to this are like, "There's no way. There's no way that could happen to me." Sadly, it happens too often to people of all sorts. And I think that's part of the issue — like you were saying, she's going to grab the strap where it normally is. You drive to work a hundred times this way, but it's this one day where it was your turn to take the infant to daycare, and you just get into this mode, this habit, this routine. And now we have to have our car talking to us. Some cars will even say, "Have you checked the back seat for an infant?" It's like, gosh, have we come to that level where we need to be reminded of these things?

So I think that's where it becomes lethal. It's sometimes talked about in terms of prospective memory — remembering to do something in the future. We think of memories usually as remembering something from the past, but a lot of it is: what do you have to do today? Are you meeting this person? We offload this to our phones and get reminders. But we're prone to forgetting, especially under high arousal.

Even as simple as when you're in the car, you start mind wandering. You're thinking of a million other things, and all of a sudden you've arrived somewhere or you missed your turn. Our brain kind of takes over in ways that we might not be sure about.

Andrew Huberman: One of the things that spooks me about scuba diving — and I love scuba diving — is that you actually don't have to update your certification very often. It's been five or more years since I went scuba diving last time. I've got my card. I have my gear. And if somebody wants to go scuba diving tomorrow, I can do it legally. But there's a lot involved. You need to brush up. And so there are a lot of ways in which we can do damage to ourselves or others just by virtue of the fact that we don't have to brush up on certain skills. It's kind of a shock to me that we don't have more problems related to forgetting.

Dr Alan Castel: It's true. The more you think about it, it's amazing how much we do remember, especially under some circumstances. I got certified too, when I was 20. I wouldn't trust myself to do it again. I'd want to probably take the entire course again. And maybe when you're 30 you feel confident. Especially with drivers — you give very little training to younger drivers and then you're like, "You're on your own." I've seen it with my children learning to drive. I also realize I'm not as good a driver as I thought I was. I'm certainly passing on some habits that I probably should be more aware of. They're more rule-based. They're aware of how to do things. But I have this feeling of wisdom — "Well, you don't need to do that" or "That's the rule, but I do it this way." So I think revisiting these things more often and being more cognizant would probably make us safer.

Why Older Adults Tell the Same Stories

Andrew Huberman: On the lighter side — many people who are concerned about their memory as they age will ask about forgetting. I want to know why, as people get older, they tell the same stories over and over again, the same jokes over and over again. Have they forgotten that they've said the joke, or are they just doing it for their own entertainment? What is this about?

Dr Alan Castel: I think there are a lot of reasons. A lot of memories do change with age, and some forms of memory like source memory tend to decline with age. You can't remember where you saw the headline or who you told the joke to. And sometimes I'll even say, "Have I told you this before?" But sometimes it's just such a good joke or such a good memory that I'm like, I don't really care — I'm going to tell it to you again because I'm enjoying this. And my kids will be like, "Yeah, we've heard that so many times." So it's probably a little bit of both.

But I think there's also some nostalgia. When families get together for Thanksgiving, there's this rehashing of "Do you remember when this happened?" A lot of our histories used to be oral histories where we're telling stories and reminding people. It's how we determined what foods were safe.

I take a certain amount of enjoyment from it. There's a nostalgia. There's also a feeling of familiarity. So probably it's a collection of things. But you do see more pathological aging where people will completely forget. They'll say the same things, they'll ask, "What's for dinner again?" five minutes later. And that's where it's probably more concerning.

Alzheimer's, Cognitive Decline, and Superagers

Andrew Huberman: What is the consensus now on Alzheimer's and memory loss generally? Is it inevitable that people lose some amount of memory, and conditions like Alzheimer's are just a more rapid downward trajectory? Are there people who are sharp till the day they take their last breath, and that last breath comes in their 90s or even past 100?

Dr Alan Castel: I think the diversity that accompanies aging is really interesting. You could look at a 100-year-old who's doing really well and a 60-year-old who's not doing so well. So we can't just use biological age as the marker.

There's an old study on nuns — it's interesting to see how you can test different people, but nuns are very committed to their profession. You found that these nuns, when they passed away, their brains had the hallmark signs of dementia — plaques and tangles — but behaviorally they were still high functioning. So it's really interesting that the hardware shows what we see as dementia, specifically Alzheimer's disease, but their behavior was that of a fairly healthy cognitive person. Something else has to be going on. It could be having a sense of purpose, having social connections — we know that's incredibly important.

I think we do have a certain amount of control over it. Some of it might be based on physical exercise and sleep. And some of it is having a positive attitude about aging. If you feel like it's all genetic, so what do you have to do? Well, if you go on a walk — some really good research shows that walking three or four times a week can enhance hippocampal function, the part of the brain that's very involved in declarative memory. That part of the brain, having turned 50 recently, tends to decline by about one to two percent a year in terms of volume. So this is kind of physical shrinkage of the brain.

But in the walking group — the group that was randomly assigned to walk three to four times a week for 40 minutes, compared to a stretching group who's still engaging in exercise but not cardiovascular exercise — the walking group's hippocampus actually increased in volume by 1%. So you're changing the brain, but you're also changing the behavior. Their memory was much better a year later.

So I think if you saw a doctor and said, "I'm having some memory problems, what can I do?" — most people are looking for a pill. But I think physical exercise can be so important. The mechanism we don't know exactly, but it probably trickles down to things like improvements in sleep as well. If you're getting exercise maybe earlier in the day, you're going to have better mood, you're going to sleep better. We know a lot of memory formation happens when you're sleeping. We know as we get older our sleep quality tends to decline even if our quantity tends to increase.

So just knowing that there are some things we can do — and I'm using physical exercise as the example, and it doesn't have to be the extreme version. Walking, dancing, being outside — that can be incredibly important to offset some of the things we do know can lead to dementia.

Andrew Huberman: Was the walking vigorous?

Dr Alan Castel: In this group, I think it's really 30 to 40 minutes. And there's nothing special certainly about walking, but it's something where you can randomly assign people to either walk or engage in stretching. So if you're biking, if you're swimming, if you're dancing, any of these things can be beneficial. Here it's, you know, you can randomly assign people to walk. And it should be at a rate where — there's research showing that people who walk slightly faster actually live longer.

Andrew Huberman: Reverse causality there?

Dr Alan Castel: Could certainly be that. And a lot of this research — it's tough to do aging research because it's hard to randomly assign people to certain conditions. But I think as a psychologist, knowing that you have a little bit of control over the process is important.

And I think most people when they talk about aging are so worried about dementia and Alzheimer's disease specifically. But balance is even more important, I think, and most people aren't even aware of their balance. One in four people over the age of 65 will experience a fall. And that fall can be very detrimental — you can break your hip, your collarbone. Often you're getting up at night more frequently, you trip over a carpet or a rug. And if you're in bed recovering from these falls, you're not walking, your hippocampus is shrinking.

If you ask people, "How's your balance?" most people are like, "Well, it's fine. I haven't had a fall." But there's a very simple test — you just stand up and see if you can balance on one leg for at least 10 seconds. Ideally 30 to 40 seconds. When I do presentations, most people do pretty well if it's a younger group. But sometimes it's older adults I'm speaking to, and you can tell that balance changes considerably with age.

Andrew Huberman: And then you say, "Okay, now try doing it with your eyes closed."

Dr Alan Castel: And I actually usually don't do this with my older adult group. But you'll see the younger people start to tip. We get a lot of cues from our visual environment for balance.

Andrew Huberman: It's like a field sobriety test.

Dr Alan Castel: It very much is. But it's this again from a metacognitive standpoint where you think your balance is fine because you haven't had a fall, but you could be close to falling at any given point. The cerebellum — the almost very primitive part of the brain — is involved in a lot of this. What's interesting with balance is it's very trainable. There are parts of balance that involve visual and inner ear systems, but if you engage in some training — and it can be as simple as standing on one leg, or doing yoga or tai chi — you can improve your balance considerably within a month or two.

So I think when I talk to older adults who are sometimes even middle-aged and worried about their memory, balance is often overlooked and it's something that's trainable. I've started to do it a little bit and I've noticed changes in my balance. I also notice when I don't sleep well, my balance isn't as good. And I think that's probably the most important thing to be on the lookout for, because if you lose your balance and have a fall, you're not going to be engaging in physical exercise, and your memory is going to decline.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, the old skiers and the old surfers look to be in pretty awesome shape. There are a million compounds there — the sunlight, the social connection, the water, the cold. Obviously it's not just the skiing or the surfing, but there are certain sports where you look at the people and you say, "Okay, they're not the biggest and strongest, nor are they the ones with the most endurance, but on balance, they seem strong. Their posture looks good."

I'm intrigued by the fact that I look at a lot of these videos of superagers and athletes in their 70s, 80s, 90s who are doing remarkably well. It's very rare to see a video of athletes or non-athletes past 80 where they're breathing through their nose with their mouth shut. Almost always you see this open-mouth breathing pattern. I'm not saying it's causal, but there does seem to be a shift in the way that people breathe as they get older.

I do think the shift in how we breathe, spontaneous movement — these things all go together. It's the movement, it's the exercise, the novelty, the social connection, but ultimately there's a lot of other things going on. Like, we know older people just don't move spontaneously very much.

We had Twyla Tharp here — the world-famous choreographer — and she's somewhere in her 80s. She can deadlift twice her body weight. Works out at 5:00 a.m. every morning for two hours. She boxed for a while. But she doesn't sit like I'm sitting, kind of lazy back. She's fully active and she's moving and she's nasal breathing unless she's speaking. Her nervous system is turned on. I notice that and I go, "God willing, I'll be like that." But I notice with each passing year, I take a few more opportunities to lean against things as opposed to standing up straight.

Dr Alan Castel: I think the insight is so important — to be like, "I notice I'm doing more of this." I'm not an expert in this area, but just getting more oxygen to the brain is so important. And I think that's probably the mechanism for physical exercise — you're getting more oxygen to your brain, which as you get older it's harder to do. And maybe with advances, we're going to find other ways to do that.

It's also, you know, we have age-based stereotypes of what happens. Like, "My knee hurts." And some people are like, "Oh, well, you're just getting older." Well, my other knee is the same age and it feels fine. Something's going on. Maybe there's some trauma. But it does give you this feeling like, hey, there's something I can do.

I'm a firm believer in physical therapy. A lot of the exercises we do — if you keep doing the same thing, that's great, but then you lose a lot of the other muscle mass. And I think even walking — people will say it's really like a controlled form of losing your balance and regaining it, and losing your balance and regaining it. And you add that into hiking, which has unpredictable surfaces — now all these muscles that you're not using too often have to be engaged. So challenging yourself can be very important. Putting yourself in uncomfortable positions.

I remember when I first started teaching — 300 people, this is an uncomfortable situation. And one of my mentors said, "You know what? There's only one thing you need to do, and that's breathe." Because you start to forget that. That is the most primitive thing — to get oxygen to your brain — and then you can do what you probably can do quite well.

Aging, Happiness, and the Midlife Dip

Andrew Huberman: On the lighter side, many people who are concerned about their memory as they age will ask about forgetting. I want to know why, as people get older, they tell the same stories over and over again. But let me shift to something else. What is the consensus now on Alzheimer's and memory loss generally? And are there people who just are sharp till the day they take their last breath, and that last breath comes in their 90s or even past 100?

Actually, let me ask this: you mentioned turning 50 recently. Are you happier at 50 than you were at 40?

Dr Alan Castel: I think I am. I think I'm more content. When I was at 20 or 30, I could do whatever I want — scuba dive, play basketball, bounce back from an injury. But my internal landscape was absolutely not more peaceful. I actually see it in a lot of undergraduates who are like, it's a confusing time. You're trying to figure out what you want to do. You're in a different place. You have different partners. And yet we almost romanticize that college is the best time in your life.

Andrew Huberman: Oh my god. No.

Dr Alan Castel: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: I am very happy, but 40 was rough. My 40th birthday I was like, "This is rough." Coming up in science, I loved doing it, loved the experience. But it was very stressful. Raising money for your lab. A postdoc is a very uncertain time. A lot of uncertainty, a lot of stress. And now I have stressors, but I view them differently. I feel completely differently about stress in general. I don't think teen years, certainly not for me, or 20s or 30s are the best years of your life.

Dr Alan Castel: I mean, there's fun parts to it and there's a lot of novelty, and you did things then that you probably wouldn't do now. But I think when we talk about aging, we're talking about how negative it can be and all these things that can happen physically. But a lot of the older adults I talk to and I've interviewed for my book are saying, "Actually, 60 or 70 is probably the best time in my life."

That makes you feel good, because it's not like it's the best time in terms of aches and pains, or sure, I wish I was 40 for some reasons. But those times can be very challenging and stressful. So from a psychological standpoint, it's interesting to look at these nonlinear dynamics. It's not a linear decline. It's not that happiness just gets better with age. There can be this midlife dip. And some people call this the midlife crisis, but there's really conflict at every stage. Erikson's work said every decade there's a conflict, and it's how you resolve it that allows you to move on to the next stage of life.

And it's probably how you deal with what happens in the middle that allows you to age well. When I talk about aging, most of the older adults I talk to — I'm not educating them on how to age well. They're there and they're doing it. It's often middle-aged people who are like, "Well, I have older parents." Most people when they're 20 or 30 aren't thinking, "What's my life going to be like when I'm 70 or 80?"

Andrew Huberman: Even now, that's hard for me to conceptualize.

Dr Alan Castel: Sure. I just try and do the best I can to take care of myself every day so that hopefully I'll hit 60, 70 feeling great. I actually feel better physically now than I did in my 40s and 30s, but I was working so much then. I think a little more balance would have been healthy. Now I work a lot, but I definitely take time to meditate, to pray, spend time with people in my life. I really try and savor things a bit more.

The problem with academic science, as you know, is there's always a deadline or revision or something. There's always something. Once you realize there's always something...

Andrew Huberman: I think it's in a lot of professions. People are very driven early. They have to prove themselves. You're trying to survive, make money, make a name for yourself. And that puts a lot of stress on you. As you get further along, you might realize maybe it's not worth it, or maybe there's more important things. And I think it really does come down to balance.

John Wooden, the UCLA basketball coach — I got to interview him when he was in his 90s. He said it really comes down to two things. And I thought, "Oh, this is great. Coach Wooden is going to tell me the two things." And he thought of himself as a teacher, not just a coach. So he did a very effective thing — he had me guess those two things. "The two most important words in the English language," is how he said it. And here I am a student again. I'm thinking, he's a coach, so — success, teamwork, what is it?

And he said the most important thing is love. Be around the people you love. Do the things you love. He lost his wife well before he passed away. He wouldn't sleep on her side of the bed. He would write her a letter every month. He had report cards from his grandchildren on the wall right next to letters from presidents. He was really surrounded by a great community. His former players were by his bedside when he passed away.

And then the second most important word is something I think a lot of people struggle with — and it's balance. It's partly physical balance. He did have a fall. He had a life alert button around his neck. He fell in the middle of the night, broke his collarbone and his wrist, and he had this life alert button — but he didn't press it.

Andrew Huberman: Because of pride.

Dr Alan Castel: Exactly. He didn't want to bother anyone. He waited until the morning when his caretaker arrived, who rushed him to the hospital. Thankfully he survived. But that's pride, guilt, shame — didn't want to bother someone. So that's the physical balance. And then the mental balance — as he said, he was a very driven person, very successful with his coaching, but it meant a lot of time traveling, a lot of time away from his family, not focusing on the things he found incredibly important. As he got older, he felt like he could achieve more balance — spend more time doing the things he wanted, be around the people he wanted. And I think that's a struggle for a lot of people.

Goals, Purpose, and the Will to Live

Andrew Huberman: Do you map out your future? Do you have a three or five-year plan? I find that academics tend to operate on the three to five-year plan because grants generally are somewhere between three and five years. That's pretty much all we can reasonably predict about where we're going to go with our ideas. But do you ever recall having a plan? Do you plan where you're going?

Dr Alan Castel: I don't think I was ever sat down and said, "Listen, you want to focus on day-to-day, but you've got to have a plan, and the plan should put the horizon at three years or five years." I just sort of defaulted to that because of academics. And it's very hard for me to think past five years.

I think people often say in business too — the plan you have is important because it can motivate you. When I first got this job at UCLA, I was thrilled to leave the cold weather of Toronto and live on the West Coast. But I also said, "If it doesn't work out, let's see — in three to five years." I didn't have this specific plan of "I have to do this," but I also had a plan like, "Hey, I'd love to write a book that is accessible and can capture the lessons I've learned." I didn't put a timeline on that, but when I first met my wife, I told her I was really interested in doing this. And she was very encouraging. Ten years later, that book finally came out.

So I think when you articulate plans, there's definitely research saying that you can realize them. And when other people are thinking that's something you can or should do, I think it's beneficial. But in the academic world, there can be pressures to get grants and publish, and I think that can also hamper some creative outputs.

I'm really interested in how, with AI, people are subjected to a lot of information, and a lot of this can be used for scams and fraud. I'm interested in how older adults can be aware of these scams that can be devastating, and how we can make the world better for older adults. And when I say older, it's like — we're not that far away from, you know, why can a self-driving car be so appealing to a younger person but not an older person? If we can make technology more accessible to older people, it can certainly help. Some of it starts with attitudes about how do I engage with this? Will it work? Will I break it? Whereas younger people will just get a new iPhone and they're playing around with it without any instruction manual.

So I'm interested in that. I don't think that has a publication I'm going to get out of it, and maybe there's a grant, maybe there's consulting, but I think having a broader approach might be beneficial. These are more abstract goals, and hopefully some of them can be realized. But it's not as tied to, like, when I was younger, yeah, I wanted to get tenure at UCLA. I was happy to have children and have a house where we could be centrally located without a long commute. Those were the practical goals.

But as I get older, I feel fortunate that I've achieved some of these goals that make my life more comfortable. There are still things out there that I'm like — are we really ever going to know how memory works? Maybe, maybe not. But maybe we can make things easier to use, or now that we know memory sort of works this way, maybe we can make technology geared to help us in some meaningful way.

Andrew Huberman: Well, a comment and then a question. My comment is: if anyone needs self-driving cars, it's older folks. If you look at the accident data, if you look at the visual data — there are people whose peripheral vision is really lousy and they're driving, and most of driving is peripheral vision.

The other is nested in my question about whether you set goals — the question of whether setting goals helps us stay alive. I covered before some of the data on superagers, more of the neuroscience — the anterior mid-cingulate cortex, which seems to maintain or increase volume as superagers age and they hold on to their memory. What we understand of that structure is that it's involved in pushing into friction, pushing oneself to do something that's hard or not desirable. It seems to come up on more and more episodes of the podcast.

I teach neuroanatomy to medical students. When I started teaching neuroanatomy, we didn't know what the anterior mid-cingulate cortex does. But my colleague Joe Parvizi probed it with electrodes in humans. Every single one they stimulated said, "Feels like a big storm is coming. There's a challenge. I want to lean into it." They would kind of come up in their chair. They would get physically and mentally activated — "I'm going to, I can take this, I can do this."

It's very clear that that's the brain structure that grows. So I feel like going after a goal, having goals, something to look forward to — I wonder whether this is the basic evolutionarily hardwired circuitry for: if you're striving, you're trying to get someplace. If you're trying to get someplace, there's a concept of a future. If there's a concept of a future, well then you plan to be there, or you want to leave something behind. It might activate literally this kind of will to live. And when people don't have plans, there's really no — I mean, you could just enjoy the smell of the roses, but that becomes a bit of a closed loop.

Dr Alan Castel: It's so interesting to look at the cellular level, then the anterior cingulate, then superagers, then sense of purpose. If you look at all those different levels, and then what we look at in a Western culture is very different than some cultures that age much better. Maybe there are lessons to be learned there, because a lot of it is goal setting and motivation, but the goal is not just to live forever. It's to make the most of these moments and have this sense of purpose.

A lot of older adults do want to have this connection to younger people, or connection to a hobby or an interest. It's not as professionally driven as it is in midlife. And I think the superager thing is really interesting, because these are not people who said, "I want to live forever." And a lot of them are not people who are like, "I went to the gym four times a week." They've built it into their daily life. It's the same with blue zones — it's built into their daily life. They eat well because that's the food they enjoy and can find. They exercise not from going to the gym, but from having to walk uphill or on uneven surfaces.

So I think — and I don't want to say it's an American focus on goals and motivation and biohacking and longevity — but if you can build this into your daily life, it's so much easier. And then it just becomes, you know, I saw my father bike to work every day. In fact, he wouldn't even call it work because he didn't want to make it seem like it was work. I bike to work too in Los Angeles, which is probably not the best thing to do, but I've been able to set up my life so that I bike two miles uphill to work and then two miles downhill. It's probably sometimes the best time of my day. Sometimes it's when the best ideas come to me. I also have to be vigilant.

Andrew Huberman: I just — having lived in LA a while — it's just doors, cars opening. That's just the simple...

Dr Alan Castel: You know, other cities too. In Toronto it's even worse. But I think with the superagers, it's also resilience. These are people who, when you look at their lives, sometimes have had easier lives, and that can be beneficial in some ways — having wealth and health. But often there's a lot of resilience. You've bounced back.

We saw this during COVID. We at first thought COVID was going to be terrible for older people, because they're going to be socially isolated, they don't know how to use technology. There are certainly reasons why older adults could be more vulnerable. But what we found, at least at the psychological level — we did some of this research — older adults were much more resilient than younger adults. Younger adults went through a lot of difficult times being socially isolated, being through probably their first major situation where they can't behave the way they're normally doing it. And the older adults were the ones who are like, "Eh, I've lived through X, Y, and Z — wars, financial meltdowns, changes in family structure, deaths of close people."

And when I've interviewed people for this book, sometimes the most interesting people lived through the Holocaust and are like, "I appreciate every day." I think the best advice I got from one person was: when you're going up or downstairs, think, "I'm going up or downstairs." They're very present. They know if they're mind wandering, something can happen.

Andrew Huberman: A friend of mine — he was actually a guest on this podcast, his name is Ryan Soave, he's a trauma therapist who also treats addiction. He said occasionally he'll get a patient who was suicidal or attempted suicide because of a breakup in high school or in their 20s. He said at first when he would get these people coming through his clinic, he would think, "Listen, you want to sit this person down and just say, look, you've got your whole life ahead of you, you're going to have other opportunities, there are other fish in the sea." But he quickly came to realize that to these young adults, it feels like a loss of the entire future, because they haven't had that future yet. When he started approaching it through that lens, he was able to be more effective clinically — to just really acknowledge, "Yeah, it really feels like the whole world is coming to an end." They just don't have the perspective of having had some relationship challenges and found someone else.

Dr Alan Castel: Yeah. And it's tough, but I think as we get older, we might focus more on the positive things to enhance our mood. And maybe that's what leads to this kind of uptick in happiness as we get older. It's not just rose-colored glasses, but it's also saying, "I'm going to focus on the things that are positive, or be around the people that make me feel good."

I've also heard a lot of older adults will say, "As I get older, I just don't have time for that anymore. I don't want to focus on the negative things or talk to people who bring me down." But when we're young, we're all around different people and might complain about things — and maybe that's beneficial, so you can see the bad things and rise above that.

Coming back to memory — why do older adults tell the same story several times? Well, sometimes it's a negative story, like "I had to walk this far to school," but it usually has a positive spin to it. Maybe we do this because we have this positivity bias, or we want to relay this positive information to wash out some of the negative things that probably happened.

Some of the happier older adults I spent time with in South Florida lived through some of the worst times in Eastern Europe. And I'm like, how is this possible? Their brains change in ways that might make them look like they're not as sharp as they used to be, but they're telling jokes. They're less inhibited. I learned some of the dirtiest jokes from these individuals. And I love teaching at UCLA and being around students, but it's very different than talking to older adults.

Every once in a while, we have this senior scholars program that allows older adults to take undergraduate classes. To me, that's probably the most enriching thing. I teach a class on the psychology of aging, and here in the classroom there are four older adults. This year, several of them were therapists. They had a lot of information to share, but they're even told as part of the program that they're not supposed to ask questions. And I thought that was so strange. In my class, I want them to — I assume if they're in astronomy or art history, they could be asking tons of questions.

I think this is such a great way to have this intergenerational component. A lot of the students — I tell them, "I have two tests, but I don't have a final exam. The final exam is the test of life." I know it sounds a little corny, but everything you learned about aging, you're hopefully going to use in the future. And it was the older adults in the class that the students often said they learned the most from.

So I think having more of this intergenerational interaction is really important. In different cultures, that's built into the community. In Western culture, not so much. I mean, some people grow up with their grandparents in the same household. I didn't, but the times I did have with my grandparents were very informative. You share genetic overlap with these individuals, yet they also have wisdom and knowledge. Some of it is dated, but I think being around older adults can be very beneficial.

Subjective Age, Attitude, and the ABCs of Successful Aging

Andrew Huberman: There's a really cool course at Stanford Medical School that I sat in on years ago about neural regeneration. They had a young person — a guy in his 20s who had a spinal cord injury. He came in, talked about his injury, talked about what life was like before and after, how he's thinking about things. And then on a separate lecture there was an older individual who had also had a spinal cord injury. It was striking to see the divergence in attitude.

The older gentleman was saying that he had this injury, he knows he's never going to walk again, but he's lived a lot of life and done a lot of things. He's going to focus on what he can do. He actually noted that he wasn't that much worse off compared to his peers, unless he let himself become a pessimist. So if he was an optimist, he was actually still doing better than a lot of his walking, able-bodied peers.

Whereas the younger gentleman was talking about how there are just so many things on the horizon that he hasn't done that he really wanted to do that he doesn't have access to — which is really heartbreaking to hear.

I think if you accrue enough experiences, good and bad, we kind of bucket-list life. "Okay, I did this and I did that. Maybe I would have liked more of that, but I can't do that anymore." And I never had a bucket list growing up. It would have been very useful — at any age, I guess — to just sit down and write out what are the things you absolutely don't want to leave this life not having done, and try to make those happen. Because if you have one of these injuries, or you stroke out or have a heart attack — not to sound morbid — then you've done the things. And I think that's the real tragedy when people are limited early on.

Dr Alan Castel: It's an interesting case study when you compare those two individuals and then say, what do you want to get out of life? It's a big picture question. But a lot of older adults will say they have pretty good life satisfaction. Happiness and life satisfaction could be similar and related. And again, it's the midlife people who seem to be lacking.

I don't know if we're at that stage, but I feel like maybe I'm on the uptick. I don't know if I have a bucket list, but I certainly would like to do more things. I really enjoyed a trip to Sedona, Arizona. I'd like to do that again.

Andrew Huberman: Sedona is amazing. My girlfriend and I went out there and we were like, "This place is awesome. It's so beautiful. The air feels so good. The light is amazing." I'll definitely go back.

Dr Alan Castel: My son and I climbed up part of the rocks there. We went there five years ago when he was too young to do that. He wanted to go back, and I was like, "These are the sorts of moments I really enjoy." And it doesn't necessarily have to be Sedona. You can go up the coast here in California and get these. So I feel like those are the moments I really enjoy.

Before, it was like, yeah, I want to fly an airplane. That would be really cool. But I have friends who fly airplanes and I'm like, you know, I have a family now. I don't need to fly an airplane anymore. I think we start to look at what really captures you and matters. And some of it are even simple hobbies like drawing — something I wouldn't have had time for when I was 20 or 30. Now those are very important moments that I enjoy.

So yeah, having a sense of purpose, sharing information — a lot of older adults will say it's really nice to be a mentor. They don't want to go back and go through the grunt work of their job, but they'd love to share experiences or be an educator. And you see big benefits for older adults who volunteer. Older adults who are engaged in some sort of generativity — influencing the next generation — feel very connected and useful. And that's something some older adults will say: "I'm retired, but I still feel like I'm useful."

Andrew Huberman: Maybe that's what grandkids are about.

Dr Alan Castel: Perhaps. Yeah. I think grandchildren — people will often say when they're close to their end of life, what were the most important things? And they'll say family rituals. Thanksgiving, Passover, when everyone got together. Those are some very important memories.

And I think some research, again correlational, shows that people who spend about five hours a week with their grandchildren have improved memory. But those who spend more than 20 hours a week don't show this benefit — in fact, might show the opposite.

Andrew Huberman: They're exhausted.

Dr Alan Castel: They're exhausted, or they're in an unfortunate situation where they're forced into child care because there's a single parent or someone's incarcerated. So it's interesting to get that insight — yes, being around younger people or doing some meaningful interaction, whether it's mentoring or grandchildren, can be beneficial. And I think it's bidirectional — the children learn from it too.

I didn't spend a lot of time with my grandparents, but I have very vivid memories of one grandfather showing me how you can clean a penny in Coca-Cola. That's like science. It was like, "That's crazy. Should I be drinking this?" There are all sorts of questions I had. And so I think that sort of interaction can be very useful for both the grandparent and the grandchild.

Andrew Huberman: I'm putting a strong vote for national parks. If you can get yourself to Yosemite, drive up to the high country and hike Clouds Rest. It's the best thing you'll ever do.

Dr Alan Castel: That's on my bucket list.

Andrew Huberman: But get there early because you'll be coming down in the dark if you don't. And bring water because there's no water along the way.

The discussion you had with Wooden — you said the two takeaways he offered were love and balance, and then ironically he got harmed and eventually died from a fall because his pride got in the way. Was there anything else in that conversation that didn't get into your book, or that was more subtle that you think about?

Dr Alan Castel: First of all, it wasn't the fall that led to his death. He had a fall, he didn't press his life alert, but he was resilient. He bounced back. I think he was nearly 99 when he passed away — several years after the fall.

That was such an inspiring interview. I remember when I first got my job at UCLA — growing up in Canada, I'll admit the reason I knew UCLA was the basketball team, the football team. I remember watching the Rose Bowl. And I thought, that place sure looks nice in the winter.

He was very interested in serving as a coach but also as a teacher. So this sort of generativity — he was so kind and thoughtful. And then you come into his place — it's a two-bedroom condo in Encino. This is not how a famous basketball coach would live now. And he had no problem with that. He wasn't interested in wealth or anything like that. I think partly he didn't have it and led a very fulfilling life in the absence of that. Whereas now you see in professional sports, wealth can lead to all sorts of problems.

So I was impressed with that. And I tried to distill it in the book to capture not just what Wooden said, but others — what I call the ABCs of successful aging. It's an easier way to organize things.

A is for attitude — having a positive attitude about what can happen as you get older. More recent research shows that those who have a positive attitude live longer and are less likely to develop dementia. It's probably less stress, better behavior. But more recent research shows that if you have a more negative attitude overall about what can happen as you get older, but a more positive attitude about what you can do — your own personal agency over the process — that leads to a longer life.

Andrew Huberman: That's that friction again.

Dr Alan Castel: It's the friction. It's the balance. You don't want things too easy. You don't want them too hard. It's the delta — the difference between where you're at versus where you'd like to be. And not letting that turn you into a cynic, but feeling that friction. You can't just kick your feet up all the time.

And I think if you notice — look, bad things can happen as you get older, but I'm going to have to rise above it by doing these things. That's the adapt component. So attitudes, but also adapting, because you're not going to have an easy time. A lot of the older adults I've talked to had to adapt to changes, whether physical or mental.

And then B is balance, which is what we've talked about already. The superagers are not extremists. They're not running marathons and eating only blueberries. It's usually something like, "Yeah, I just do this or that and it works out."

Andrew Huberman: That suggests some sort of genetic component.

Dr Alan Castel: I think there is a genetic component, but it's not the extreme. It's probably having some level of balance and some genetic component.

And then C is often overlooked from a psychological standpoint — connection. That's also what Wooden was emphasizing: be around the people you love, do the things you love. Social connection — we learned during COVID, all of a sudden people are like, "Oh my gosh, I can't be around people." Or you can see them on Zoom, but it's different. All of a sudden it hits home that social connection is important.

Now, it's different for different people in terms of how they want to engage in it. But I think that's often lost, sadly, because of technology. You can have tons of Facebook friends, but how many friends could you call up once a week to ask how their day is? That number is probably limited. And as we get older, our social circle tends to shrink — people move away, people pass away. But some research shows the quality of those fewer relationships can actually be improved. And I think that's again an interesting nonlinear change — when we're young we know lots of people and we're interacting a lot socially, but as we get older it's those more meaningful relationships that are important.

AI, Scams, and Protecting Older Adults

Andrew Huberman: The connection piece comes up again and again. And I think it must be kind of daunting for people in their 20s and 30s now because there's all this stuff that you can do to make yourself better that we frankly weren't aware of back when. I kind of wonder if it's both good and bad. I don't want to undercut the idea that we can strive for those things, but I also don't want to promote the idea that we should all be thinking about what it's going to be like when we're 70.

The unit of life being the day, I think, is true in the circadian sense. Our biology resets every 24 hours. Having recently pulled an all-nighter to finish some book edits — my producer and friend Rob and I legitimately pushed through. It was fun to just be able to do that. As much as I talk about the benefits of sleep, it's like, "That was cool. Haven't done that in a while. Still got it." It hurt the next day. Got a nap. Next day slept a little longer. Did I shorten my life? I don't know. But I'll remember that.

Dr Alan Castel: You'll remember it, and you're contributing to something that you think is important. This is a book. This is something you want to make sure is accurate and thoughtful. And when you work hard at something, it does make you feel good. You're probably getting a lot of neurotransmitter reward mechanisms kicking in.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, it was so much fun. This is why I always say the occasional late night out or all-nighter, as long as it's for the right reasons — I wish that for people. Occasional.

As you can tell, I'm really intrigued by this idea that there's something about pushing ourselves. And as Wooden pointed out, there's also something about coming off the gas, being able to lean back and forth into those things. Life is an oscillation. It's a circadian oscillation. And then it's this push, push, push, and then being able to come off the gas. And it's an art. It's not a science. There's science there, but it's not trivial.

And it actually raises this question for me. You study memory, but you seem to have a genuine interest in and care for the older generation. How are we going to take care of them in the AI age? Is that something that's always been intrinsic to you? Most people aren't thinking about the older generation. It's natural for us as a species to think about the younger generation. But you're unique in this way. You study memory in the age cohort that arguably has some of the worst memory.

Dr Alan Castel: I think it's maybe growing up around a lot of older adults. I grew up in Canada partly, but also in Florida, and I was around a lot of very interesting older people in their prime of retirement life who'd spend a lot of time with me. And I have aging parents. I've seen that. I don't know if it's also a respect for older adults, but it's also — maybe it's not egocentric, but in a good way — if we're lucky, we're going to be there one day.

Andrew Huberman: So you're making the discoveries that you will yourself benefit from.

Dr Alan Castel: I hope so. And I think it's an investment. We invest a lot in our children, and it's incredibly important to be nurturing parents and have government that can help with education. But I think we look the other way once people are on social security or retired. And I think culturally, there are other cultures that treat older adults with more respect.

I teach a class on aging at UCLA. It's a popular class, but it's not as popular as the class on relationships or things that younger people would be interested in. But often after students take it, they say, "I never thought I'd be interested in aging, but now that I think about it, it's really interesting to see how my parents age." And I'm like, "Well, give yourself 30 or 40 years, and I hope you'll remember something from this class."

I remember with my grandparents, they would forget my name and confuse it with my brother's name, but they could remember the price of bananas. So how are they remembering this very detailed information versus forgetting things that are presumably important? And I think it comes down to focus. It comes down to the era you grew up in.

And in some ways, I can see in my own children — what are they going to be like when they're 80? What habits are going to stay with them and what things might change? In some ways, there's a lot of things that you could see as a seed that just gets more pronounced as we get older. But also we get better at regulating emotions and doing things that when we're young, we're not so good at.

We often think, "How can we make older people better by making them look younger?" And in fact, I sometimes think, how could we instill some of that — not just the wisdom, but make younger people feel like older people in some ways, from a psychological standpoint? Better at regulating emotions, less likely to take risks.

Andrew Huberman: You know, it's the whole "if I knew then what I know now." I have a friend who's a psychologist, and he said the two most dangerous words in the English language are "if" and "only" — especially when they're next to each other. And it's interesting to watch my mind sometimes go like, "If only this, or if only that." We can default there, and it's dreadfully useless, maybe even destructive. I encourage myself to watch out for the "if only" thinking.

Dr Alan Castel: We run a lot of simulations in our brain — what if I did this, or what if I didn't do that, or what if I met this person, or what if I took this job? And I think at some point when you're young, maybe that's helpful — trying to figure out what would work out best. But as you're older, it's like, well, these things have happened and I've learned from them.

And maybe that's why I'm interested in older adults — it's like, look, these people at 70, 80, 90 — I'm not just looking at the 90-year-olds who are doing incredible things. I'm looking at the 90-year-olds who are perhaps at peace with themselves, feel comfortable, talking about things that they want to talk about.

Andrew Huberman: He has an irreverence to him. He's very polite and believes in etiquette, but he doesn't let people constrain him.

Dr Alan Castel: And I just found that a lot of these podcasts have a lot of science in them, but he had a lot of things that made me think, "Gosh, that's interesting. Could we test that?"

One of our more recent studies has shown that as we get older, memory does decline in many ways, but older adults can remember prices — that makes sense. You know, bananas being $2.99. But as soon as we say bananas are $18.49, that just doesn't make sense, and older adults quickly forget that. That's the benefit of forgetting things that just don't fit your schemas, that just don't make sense. Whereas younger adults — a lot of undergraduates will be like, "I highlighted 80% of the textbook, why did I get a C on the exam?" It's this inability to selectively focus on what's important.

I've seen that even in myself. When I was younger, I'd be taking notes on everything. But by your fourth year, you realize, let me sit back and look for the overarching themes that connect things. That's almost how I did well in psychology — some of these findings make sense, so I can remember them that way. Some are counterintuitive. The things that made sense and the things that didn't make sense — that's how you can organize things. And that can be a useful principle as you get older: knowing what to overlook and knowing what to focus on.

So in this study on curiosity, we found that older adults tend to remember the things they're most curious about, but they're also really good at forgetting the things they just didn't care about in the first place.

Andrew Huberman: Sounds great. Honestly, it sounds great. Because I want to learn more about certain things, remember certain people and certain things, but there's a lot of stuff that rolls through my phone or through my email that I don't want to think about.

Dr Alan Castel: And it captures your attention, and all of a sudden you're like, "Where did the last 10 minutes go? I've been reading about this and now I'm remembering this useless thing."

So I think if you can prune these things, and as you get older maybe you realize — I've even realized, "Gosh, I forget this. I need to focus more." It's not just conscious focus, but it's like, I'm interested in this. Let's put more resources and time and energy into that. It takes me longer to learn a piano piece than my daughter.

Andrew Huberman: You play piano?

Dr Alan Castel: I try. But I see my daughter picking these things up so quickly. And I'm like, I know I'm not going to be like that, but I can be more selective about what I try and learn, what's in my wheelhouse, and what's just beyond it.

Andrew Huberman: Developmental plasticity is amazing, right? I don't know how old she is, but I know she's younger than you.

Dr Alan Castel: She's young. I have two daughters and a son, and I see them all excelling. My older daughter — her cognitive skills are probably beyond mine in terms of speed of processing. She might even be a better driver than I am. My daughter playing piano — it's like, gosh, if I could have those skills now, how I would practice more. My son will hurt himself in baseball, and I'm like, "He's out for three weeks." Three days later, he's pitching again. Those are things where it's like, yes, aging sucks in some ways, I'll be upfront about it. But when you appreciate those things as you get to 40, 50, 60 — it's hard to recover from injuries, it takes you maybe longer to learn something. But the things you really do care about, you can use all this knowledge and wisdom and metacognition to focus on what matters the most.

Andrew Huberman: So it's almost as if as we are able to do less, attitude starts to become more and more important. That's what I'm hearing.

Dr Alan Castel: I think that's definitely the perspective. And this is built on some developmental theories — selective optimization with compensation. As you get older, maybe you're not going to be doing all these things — scuba diving and hiking — but you'll be like, "That one hike I really enjoy, I want to be able to do it once a week." So you're still doing the things you like, but not the wide range of them.

And another related theory is socioemotional selectivity theory — Laura Carstensen at Stanford — another perspective saying that as we get older, our mindset shifts. We don't have as much time to live, so we want to focus on the things that are important. Whereas when you're young, it's very abstract to say, "Save for retirement" or "What are you going to do when you're 60?" It's like, "What am I going to do next week?" But her work has shown that when you give people different time perspectives, they make different choices. If you unfortunately tell someone younger that they only have five to ten years left to live, they're going to make choices very much like older adults.

So I don't know if it's conscious that we're thinking these things, but as you get older, maybe you realize, "I want to focus on the things that matter the most. Maybe I won't worry so much about the things I used to worry about all the time." And that can be a healthy way to approach life.

Superagers, Purpose, and the Secret to Successful Aging

Andrew Huberman: This might sound a little mystical, but I've always wondered if, barring accident or injury, whether people have some unconscious knowledge about how long they're going to live. I grew up near Steve Jobs. He used to come into the skateboard shop that I worked at to get rollerblade wheels and things like that. He didn't have security. He'd walk around. When I was a postdoc, you'd still see him walking through downtown Palo Alto in the evenings. My dad and I would take a walk about once a week and we'd see Steve.

If you listen to his biography by Walter Isaacson, it was very clear that he had a mission, he was on it, that you had to maximize on your life, that you couldn't compromise. And okay, that led to some high-friction personality traits in him too. But I don't think anyone would argue that he didn't do something super impressive in what he built. It transformed the world.

And it almost seemed like he had some deeper knowledge that he wasn't going to live that long. When I think about the 27 Club of amazing artists dying at 27, it's almost like there's a life energy that's either packed into a shorter period of time, a medium amount of time, or a longer time. I wonder if we have a sense, based on our parents and grandparents, of "I'm going to be around a while" — because it really seemed to benefit him to have this attitude about life: you get one life, you have to live it on your terms, you don't want to compromise your soul and your heart, and you just go for it.

And then there are these people that sort of live life as if it's going to go on forever, and for them it seems to go on a long time. Do you think there could be something in our biology where we have some awareness based on our genetic fingerprint about how long we're going to live?

Dr Alan Castel: Yeah, it's an interesting conjecture, and in some ways we probably do know our lifespan is about this. But you're right — accidents can happen, things can happen. I've seen from my own family — I can take the average age of my mother and father, and sadly my mother passed away when she was young, my father's still alive. So I think I have this perspective that life can be short. When people are like, "I'm 50 but I haven't done this, this, and this," part of me is like, "I'm 50 and I've made it this far. I'm pretty happy with things."

In the case of these high-performing individuals, maybe they lead every day like it could be their last, and they want to stay up all night and transform the world. I think a lot of the superagers are more chill. Maybe it's not intentional. It's like, "I just don't want to ruin tomorrow by not sleeping enough tonight."

A lot of people will say, "What's the secret to successful aging?" And I think the secret is not to look for one thing. We've talked a lot about exercise, sleep. A lot of people say it's moderation — it doesn't mean don't drink coffee or drink seven cups a day. It's like, if you want a cup of coffee, have one. Get eight hours of sleep — well, not every night. Clearly pulling an all-nighter might have been a benefit for you and even a good investment.

Andrew Huberman: And I won't do it again for a very long time.

Dr Alan Castel: But then you've probably learned from that. You're like, "I don't want to be editing books late at night once a week." But once every few years, especially if it might pay off — that's part of the deal you've made with yourself.

Andrew Huberman: The friendship — I'm realizing as you say this, the fact that someone else was there is what kept me out of like, "This sucks." It's fun. It reminds me of being in graduate school. We used to run physiology experiments all night or imaging experiments all night. And you get pretty loopy somewhere between 3 and 5 a.m. and you just acknowledge, "Oh, here we go again." Like mild psychosis, because you are a little bit psychotic in a sleep-deprived state. You make it through and you're like, "Hey, we did that. That was fun."

Dr Alan Castel: Maybe that's why people say college is the best time — because you're going through a lot of things like that, staying up late, working hard, struggling through this, trying to figure out that, but there's a social component. You're doing it with other people.

And even when I talk to older adults, they're like, "I like this part of my work life when it was a challenge and we had to travel here and do that. It was exciting." They wouldn't say it was relaxing, and it's not something they want to revisit. And it's interesting — if you ask people, "What age would you want to go back to?" Not a lot of people will say 20 or 15. It's usually closer to midlife, which is interesting, because maybe everything's kind of firing on all cylinders then. Your cognition's still pretty good, your family's still around, you have your job, you're reinforced by a lot of things. But it's not going back to age 20 or 25.

Current Research: Curiosity, Scams, and Fraud

Andrew Huberman: Any experiments that your laboratory is doing now that you can tell us about?

Dr Alan Castel: Yeah. We've done some work on curiosity, and I think that's something that from a lifespan perspective is interesting. We've been measuring different types of curiosity. One is known as state curiosity and one is known as trait curiosity. Trait curiosity is just in general — are you a curious person? Do you get into things and have trouble if you don't learn the answer? I think a lot of people can have that. But as you get older, that tends to decline with age, which I thought was kind of perplexing.

But we found that levels of state curiosity — when I give you some interesting bit of information but I don't give you the answer, if it's something you care about — that actually increases with age. Your level of curiosity and learning. We think this is interesting because it probably guides our memory as we get older. We're going to remember the things we care about, and if you're curious especially so. There's probably some neurochemical pathway that is still engaged even though we know all sorts of things decline with age.

So that's one area, and we've been testing it with trivia questions — things we have experimental control over. But I think it has implications for lifelong learning. If you're really interested in hiking or bird watching or skateboarding, that might still percolate when you're 70 or 80.

And the other thing we're looking at is kind of the flip side of curiosity, which could be a double-edged sword — scams and fraud. It's almost like opening Pandora's box. As soon as someone calls you with an offer that's too good to be true, or a limited time offer, or something you always wanted at this price — or worse, "We kidnapped your granddaughter, don't call mom and dad, and all of a sudden you hear her voice on the line saying, 'Please help me.'" All of a sudden, you're wiring the money.

People are running those scams. That was when younger people were posting things on Facebook, and all of a sudden their voice is captured and now their voice is played to a grandparent who's like, "Oh my gosh, I need to help my loved one." And it's preying on socio-emotional selectivity theory — that we focus on family and feelings and emotions. And older adults get caught by this. And AI has just made this even worse, because you could get a phone call from someone that sounds just like a person you know.

So we're looking at how, as we get older, are we able to distinguish between this fake information and what's real? And it's not just older adults who are prone to this. Younger people too — in a rush, might not be paying attention, more likely to get identity theft. Whereas older adults have more money, more to lose. So there's a psychological component — emotions — that might engage older adults more so, whereas younger people are more interested in, "Oh, my loan is going to be forgiven if I give some information."

It's using psychological mechanisms in a very nefarious way. So I'm interested in how we can try to prevent that. And I feel like there are a lot of amateur psychologists out there who are engaged in this kind of fraud. So that's another area of interest — trying to design experiments but also look at more practical implications.

Andrew Huberman: It's cool. You have a lot of care for the older generation. You're a protector. That's really great. We've had a lot of discussions on this podcast about youth and every age, but I don't recall a conversation with anyone, much less a scientist, who's interested in protecting older folks.

You know, I thought about and maybe you can tell us what this wisdom thing is about. I feel like there seems to be a kind of transformation of advice from just advice to wisdom after somebody dies. When they're still around, it sounds like advice, and then they die and it's like wisdom. I'm not trying to make light of it, but it does seem like we look at knowledge from people that have passed away as different.

I haven't read much about Wooden and basketball, but I like track enough that I read the book about Bill Bowerman, the coach up at Oregon. He was another one of these amazing coaches who was much more of a mentor and teacher. He made all his runners get jobs outside of school while in school and running for this incredible track team. He would place them in jobs and made sure that they understood that the town that they were running in was much more than a university. He took the time to do this stuff. He was a hard-nosed guy. But I often wonder, when he was alive, was everyone revering him? Because as soon as you die, your words move from advice to wisdom. What is that?

Dr Alan Castel: I think Wooden got a lot of play for his wisdom. He retired at an earlier age than most people do. He didn't need to. I don't think he made as much money as coaches do now. But I think you're right — it's interesting how knowledge goes into wisdom.

Even when I was thinking of my own interest in wisdom and aging — I had an older math teacher who was also my basketball coach, and I think he was formative. He was older, and he said, "Listen, you're not going to be starting this year if you don't put the time into your calculus class that you're putting into basketball." And he was very clear about that. He said, "You have tremendous potential in calculus." He didn't say anything about basketball, but he was saying, "You need to work harder. The motivation is there." I've had older rabbis who've given me advice growing up that, not even being religious then, still resonates with me.

And so I think even at the practical level, the wisdom — sometimes it's nice to hear it from the horse's mouth. You can read a cute little quote and that's reasonable. But wisdom also has a very practical application.

Sully Sullenberger — the pilot who landed the plane on the Hudson River. A plane takes off from New York City, both engines go out, he's over New York City and has to make an emergency landing. So who do you want? Do you want a younger pilot who has faster reaction times and better memory, or do you want an older pilot who has more experience flying but has never landed a plane on water? And we know how the story ends, thankfully.

Most people, as I ask my class this — it's like the dilemma. Where is the wisdom? Where is the knowledge? If you're the faster pilot, maybe you turn around and land at an airport. That makes more sense. But Sully eventually decided he had to make this water landing. And he said the reason he knew he could pull this off is he used to fly gliders, and he said the principles are the same, but it's going to be very different physics and weight management. He said he felt like he'd made a number of investments over the years of boosting his knowledge so that he could make one enormous withdrawal — basically landing this plane on the Hudson River.

And so I think that's a nice illustration of: you can accumulate all this knowledge not just to apply what you've learned, but you're having to transform that knowledge — "Now I'm going to apply it in this one emergency situation." So maybe that's the difference between knowledge — "I know so much" — and wisdom — how to carry it out, or when it's appropriate.

Andrew Huberman: It does help when the coaches have played, right? Like Steve Kerr. But some of the best coaches are the ones who were the worst players — they struggled and they've seen it, and now they're going to go into coaching. And maybe that's the same with older adults. If you see a therapist, would you want to see a 20-year-old or would you want to see a 50 or 60-year-old? It just seems like there's going to be a difference in what they bring to the table.

Nowadays, I think a lot of people are going to say ChatGPT. I've found great use of AI in the self-testing thing — not looking for knowledge, but having ChatGPT generate a self-test, test me on my knowledge of something. Because self-testing is one of the best ways to learn information, realize, "Ah, I got that wrong. I didn't know that." That's the delta — the difference between where you're at and where you want to be — as opposed to just reciting things or highlighting things or writing them down.

A lot of people are going to the internet for answers. On the one hand, we could say those answers are the synthesis of a lot of wise people potentially. But you could say, "Give me the integrated advice of Mahatma Gandhi, Jane Goodall, and whoever, for this particular situation." I don't know what it would say.

Dr Alan Castel: I've tried. I'm not of the era that my children are in terms of using AI, but I'd love to be like, "Answer this like an 80-year-old would. How would you present it differently if you were older versus younger?" Because a lot of it is just so much information. And sometimes I'm like, "Can you summarize this?" Sometimes it misses things and sometimes it's good. But it's really fascinating how that sort of synthesis can be so transforming.

And even my son is like, "Why do I have to learn this when I can just ask AI?" It used to be when I was a kid, "Why do I have to learn this when I can just look it up in an encyclopedia?" The information is always going to be there, but it's how you're going to use it in an informed way. I always say, could you imagine if the next president said, "I don't know our foreign policy with Mexico, but I could look it up"? You want to know a little bit about the foreign policy — friend or foe or something. You have to have some basic level. And usually that comes from learning all the details. It's like you've learned all these details in neuroscience 20 years ago that you've probably forgotten, but it informs how you interpret neuroscience findings today.

Andrew Huberman: I'm admittedly such a nerd. I have this textbook — my colleague Liqun Luo wrote a Principles of Neurobiology textbook. Not as beefy as the Principles of Neuroscience one out of Columbia, but I'm a West Coast guy, so I like Liqun's book. And recently I just started reading it front to back. Of course, I recognize every line because this is the area I've spent all these years in, but I hadn't thought about a lot of it in a while, and I'm thinking about it a little differently. Maybe I'm lying to myself, but I tell myself there's some enrichment in this. I don't know what it is. I'm not just brushing up. There's something that's going to come of this. But maybe I should be learning Latin or something like that instead.

Dr Alan Castel: It's almost like nostalgia — you're going back to something you remember learning. It's also more fun because now you can connect it to the other things you've been thinking about. It's like going back to a language you're familiar with or a city you're familiar with.

The big question is, are we deluding ourselves into thinking that the brain somehow gets better as we age? Obviously, if we do the right things — which you've described in your book and today — you know, get a bit more meaning and experience, or in keeping with Erikson's stages of development where there's a core conflict at every stage of life, development doesn't stop when we become young adults. Neuroplasticity continues throughout the lifespan. Maybe our brains get better in certain ways that afford us access to life experience, internal feelings of wellbeing and peace and things that are outsized in comparison to what we can experience when we're young.

Dr Alan Castel: I like that perspective too, of course. But maybe it's hard to say what's better or what's worse. It's like this is a qualitative difference. And if your expectation of old age is quite low and you realize, "Wait, it doesn't have to be like that" — or, "I'm not going to run as fast as I used to, or maybe I won't be scuba diving, but hey, it can actually be very meaningful" — it might encourage you to engage in behaviors that'll allow you to get there and be there in a mobile way, a way that you'll enjoy it.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. So maybe instead of striving to be a superager, we should strive to be super content. Something like that.

Dr Alan Castel: I think there's a quote people say: aging is better than the alternative.

Andrew Huberman: Is youth lost on the young though?

Dr Alan Castel: I definitely feel like there are times where I'm like, maybe I shouldn't call the book Better with Age because — let's revise that. Because of all sorts of things you can do when you're younger and you don't even appreciate it. You don't even think twice. "Wow, it hurt yesterday, but it doesn't hurt today." That's months for me.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, but the social stuff is so stressful.

Dr Alan Castel: It can be. But I'm not sure at that time it's relative to what. And I think there are a lot of challenges with younger people today. But I've also seen a more focused attention on mental health. I've seen with my daughters — they're like, "I'm going to go for a walk." When I was 17, I wasn't just going for a walk. I was walking to get somewhere or running to get something. But now there's this awareness of, "Maybe I'll take care of myself. Maybe I'll listen to that podcast while I'm walking." That seems very wise. And I hope that those sorts of habits, as you develop them earlier, can stay with you and maybe buffer in midlife where it's like, "I always have to be busy."

And I think maybe that's why my interest or even obsession with aging is to be like, wow, there's this group of people that seem to be doing pretty well, and I really enjoy being around them. How can I be like them? And oh, it so happens they're older adults. But if you went to a country and you're like, "This group of people are really cool and interesting and kind of quirky — maybe I'll live here." And to me, that might be what older age can be. And sure, they're sometimes frail and have to rely on other people, but that's not always such a bad thing if you have the right structure in place.

Andrew Huberman: You're doing important work, and I'm grateful that you would come here today and share your knowledge and wisdom with us. Your book — I didn't know you were going to give me a book today — Better with Age: The Psychology of Successful Aging. I'm going to read it. I'm going to encourage you to write more books because clearly you've gathered more knowledge since then. But it's a rare find that somebody is doing really interesting science and their work is immediately applicable, and that it taps into a segment of our population that exists everywhere in the world but that frankly doesn't get quite as much research attention as other areas.

I know there's a big interest in longevity, there's a big interest in aging and preserving what we have. But in addition to studying all those things, you clearly study other aspects of what's unique and great about people 50 and above, and what we can all learn. Because if we're lucky enough to live into those decades, we're all going to be benefiting from this knowledge. So thanks for coming here today. Let's do it again as more comes off the mill from your lab.

Dr Alan Castel: Thank you. Thanks for getting the word out. It's really wonderful to hear how to digest this, and it gives me new ideas of what we can pursue as we think about this.

Andrew Huberman: Great. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.

Dr Alan Castel: Thank you. Thanks.