____TheSkepticalPsychologist.com____ Weekly Blog & Podcast

When U.S. presidential candidate John McCain had a birthday recently, television talk-show host Jay Leno told McCain that he had planned to get him a birthday cake but that the local fire chief had objected, commenting, “That many candles?”Indeed, 72-year-old McCain is the oldest person in U.S. history to run for the presidency, and his opponent, 46-year-old Barack Obama, once accused McCain of “losing his bearings,” a polite way of saying that McCain is becoming senile. McCain, in turn, sometimes refers to Obama as “that young man with very little experience.”

The age issue is one of many that will help decide the upcoming election. What’s the truth about it? How much difference does age actually make in competent leadership? Does cognitive ability really decline as we age, and, if so, by how much?

The American public is predictably divided on this issue. Some believe that Obama is indeed too young to assume such high office, even though John F. Kennedy was a mere 43 when he became president. Others insist that McCain is just too old, noting that President Ronald Reagan showed clear signs of Alzheimer’s disease during his second term in office, when he was in his late 70s. Barely three years out of office, Reagan’s cognitive impairment had become severe.

At 55, having been a research psychologist for 30 years now, I decided to take a dispassionate look at these issues. The process proved to be painful in some respects, particularly when I took an honest look at my own declining abilities. But I have long believed that knowing is better than not knowing, no matter what the pain. And when it comes to the issue of cognitive decline, knowing might also be the best defense.

Here, in brief summary form, is what relevant research says about the usual course of cognitive abilities as we age.

First, let’s consider a rather basic ability: learning. Most middle-aged people are aware that their elderly parents are mystified by the latest DVD players, PDAs, and iPods — and that the quickest way to solve a computer problem is to ask a teenager, or even a child. Do you see the trend here? Indeed, research shows unequivocally that our ability to learn new things peaks during our teen years and declines steadily thereafter. One illustrative study, conducted by Harry Braun and Richard Geiselhart a half-century ago, even showed that classical conditioning — that most basic of learning processes first studied by Ivan Pavlov in the early 1900s with dogs — barely occurs at all in elderly humans.

Our ability to acquire new knowledge declines in part because of a decline in most basic memory functions. The deterioration of memory is best illustrated by looking at some old research on what researchers call “incidental” memory — remembering that occurs automatically and without effort. Mnemonic strategies mastered as we get older can mask memory’s decline; when we look at what is remembered accidentally, we get a clearer picture.

Raymond Willoughby of Clark University first studied this phenomenon in 1929. He had people copy pairs of digits and symbols and then — without first having told his subjects that he was going to do so — later asked them to recall which symbol had been paired with each digit. Performance on this task improved from childhood to about age 13 and then declined thereafter, and old subjects performed more poorly on this task than children did. Incidental memory was also studied in a simple but ingenious study conducted by Harold E. Jones and his colleagues in which researchers asked people emerging from a cinema to give details about the film they had just seen. Teens and people in their early twenties performed best — and elderly people could barely remember the name of the movie without looking up at the marquis. As you age, it becomes increasingly difficult to remember things unless you make a concerted effort.

The pattern is the same on classic tests of intelligence — tests that measure basic reasoning ability, certainly an important ability for a nation’s leaders. You may have heard that “IQ” remains relatively stable throughout life, and indeed it does. That’s because IQ is a quotient (”Intelligence Quotient”) — a relative measure that expresses your test score in relation to test scores of people your own age. Your IQ stays roughly the same because you stay in roughly the same place with respect to your cohort.

When you look at raw scores, however — your actual test score before it’s expressed in relative terms — the pattern is distressing. On both the traditional intelligence tests developed by David Wechsler and the more culture-free types of tests developed by J.C. Raven and others, raw scores peak between ages 13 and 15 and decline thereafter. As Wechsler put it, after age 14, increases in mental age in succeeding half-year scores “are so small as to make them unreliable,” and the highest mental age we can achieve is fifteen and a half. In other words, IQ, the relative measure, is stable only because virtually everyone in your cohort is deteriorating at about the same rate.

Findings from studies of IQ are consistent with research conducted by Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget and his colleagues and students. Piaget found that the highest level of reasoning, which he called “formal operational thinking,” is normally achieved by age 14 or 15 — if it is ever achieved at all.

You may also have heard that brain size is a poor predictor of intelligence. That’s true when you compare species, and this also applies to genders (no one has ever figured out what human males use all that extra brain mass for). But several studies conducted over the past decade or so show that when it comes to individuals, brain size is in fact an excellent predictor of a variety of cognitive abilities. Does brain size follow the pattern we see with intelligence and memory? Indeed it does. A recent MRI study conduced by Eric Courchesne and his colleagues at the University of California San Diego shows that brain size in humans peaks at about age 14 and declines gradually thereafter. By the time a man–such as candidate McCain — is 70, his brain has shrunk to the size it was when he was about 3. This pattern occurs both for overall brain volume and for the all-important gray matter that contains signaling neurons.

Although not central to the cognition issue, I would be remiss in failing to point out that most of our perceptual and motor capabilities also fit this disturbing pattern: our visual acuity, overall hearing ability, ability to discriminate speech sounds (important during delicate meetings of state), touch sensitivity, and so on. Elderly people sometimes, ahem, face odor challenges because–according to a study conducted in the 1980s — they lose much of their sense of smell in their 70s and 80s. More to the point, reaction time — our ability to respond swiftly to sudden events, which is undoubtedly an important competency for leaders — also follows this pattern. We react to sudden stimuli most quickly in our teens and twenties and quite slowly in old age. (A new study by George Bartzokis and his colleagues at UCLA suggests that some fine motor abilities, such as finger-tapping speed, don’t start declining until age 40, but this is more relevant to pianists than presidents.)

Is the news all bad? Fortunately not. Research suggests that we do become “wiser” as we get older, meaning that we can make especially good decisions in areas where we have accumulated a great deal of specialized knowledge — as long as we don’t need to acquire a great deal of new knowledge quickly, that is. In a static world, wisdom has great value, but in a rapidly changing one, it’s prudent for the old to make way for the young.

As for the candidates, Obama, as brilliant as he appears to be, has likely started having trouble finding his keys, and McCain, his courage notwithstanding, is probably little more than a ghost of his former cognitive self.

This article originally appeared in the London Times on October 25, 2008.

Sarah Palin’s candidacy for vice president has recently generated a number of articles about merit and the lack thereof.   For example, in TIME recently, Sam Harris (”When Atheists Attack,” September 29, 2008)  wonders why a society so obsessed with competence lets down its guard completely “when it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions.” Why do we elect someone “fit to have a beer with” rather than someone fit to lead?

Harris doesn’t say, but the answer is clear.  The simple truth is that we let anyone over 18 vote, no matter how poorly they reason and no matter how little they know about government, candidates, or issues.  In early America, to vote one had to be over 21, male, white, and a property owner. In recognizing that these characteristics were irrelevant to voting competence, we’ve cast them aside one by one, leaving only age as the last irrelevant characteristic–and leaving us with an absurd system in which votes by the millions can be purchased with flashy television commercials.

The solution is to tie voting rights to minimum relevant competence.  This takes care of the rapidly growing nursing home problem, makes far fewer votes available for purchase, gives millions of people a powerful incentive to learn about government, and makes it far more likely that only competent candidates are elected.

How can an incompetent electorate be expected to elect competent leaders?

Published in the San Diego Union-Tribune, September 2, 2008

Staff writer Scott Lafee’s article (“Leaves of Gas,” Aug. 28) on artificial trees that remove carbon from the air was fascinating, but it didn’t mention what I believe to be the only viable long-term solution to the carbon problem: perfecting the technology that will turn automobiles into carbon scrubbers and then requiring that all new vehicles worldwide employ that technology. If the car, now a major contributor to the problem, can remove more carbon from the air than it produces, the problem disappears. This is the only proposal I’ve ever seen that automatically “scales up” as cultures worldwide – and especially the developing nations – inevitably become more developed and affluent. Engineers are working on the technology, and it’s only a matter of time before it’s perfected. Who needs artificial trees, when we have mobile vacuum cleaners?

Rob Stein’s recent article on the neural correlates of grief in the Washington Post (Aug. 4, 2008) blatantly misinterprets correlational research. Excited by the recent labeling of a “distinct syndrome” of severe grief that persists for long periods (where’s the discovery here?), Stein appears to be suffering from an even more serious syndrome: the “Brain Overclaim Syndrome”—legal scholar Stephen Morse’s term for the trendy and sometimes dangerous tendency to over-hype brain research. Stein seems surprised to learn that the brains of people who have trouble overcoming grief are somewhat different than the brains of people who recover more quickly. But such differences must exist—just as all behaviors and emotions must somehow be encoded in the brain. Stein’s careless assertion notwithstanding, those brain differences do not explain the differences in behavior or emotion. The idea that you explain behavior by pointing to areas of the brain that light up while someone is behaving is just plain wrong. The neural activity is just more activity to be explained. When motor neurons fire as I’m raising my hand, does the neural activity explain my movement? Of course not. During the years I served as editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, I worked hard to make sure that our writers never made the kind of mistake Stein is making—basically, interpreting a correlational study as if it revealed something about causation. The Washington Post should be no less careful.

Ben Stein’s recent avuncular article about love “by way of economics” in the New York Times (July 13, 2008) pushes folklore and metaphor to the brink, leaving the reader without direction or hope. Is your partner, who’s been crabby for a whole month now, a junk bond? If so, says Stein, hit the road! Or is your partner just a sagging market? If so, he says, stay! But he gives you no way to tell the difference, and he also seems entirely unaware of what volumes of research have taught us in recent decades: that success in relationships is largely about skills - skills, fortunately, that anyone can learn and master. Savvy investors read books, take courses, and consult with experts to sharpen their investment skills, and savvy lovers can do the same, sharpening communication, conflict-resolution, stress-management, and other skills are are critical for the success of long-term love relationships. As Diane Sollee, director of the Coalition for Marriage, Family, and Couples Education, puts it, “the survival of marriage is not about love, it’s about skills.”

Blog posted in connection with Dr. Epstein’s appearance on CNBC’s “The Big Idea, with Donny Deutsch” on June 23, 2008. To view some footage from the show, click on the link below.

Over the past 30 years or so (wow, how quickly times passes!), I’ve conducted research with animals, children, and adults that has helped me to understand the creative process in fairly rigorous terms. I’ve also developed a formal, scientific theory of creativity called Generativity Theory. I’ve concluded - contrary to popular belief! - that creativity is an orderly and predictable process. This might sound ominous, but it’s actually great news, because it means that creativity can be engineered - and that all of us can realize the enormous creative potential lying within us.

Almost all kindergarten students express creativity constantly, but by the end of the first grade, very few children do. It’s no secret why: In a very obvious, very heavy-handed way, teachers and other authority figures shut down creative expression big time. “That’s a silly question.” “Keep doing your assignment.” “Stay within the lines.” “Stop daydreaming.” That’s what we all hear, and it has an enormous effect. In fact, the only people who continue to express creativity are the misfits - the kids who just can’t be socialized. In other words, the misfits end up owning creativity!

That’s not fair, and it also isn’t necessary. My research shows that we all have roughly equal creative potential. The key to exploiting that potential is to learn and practice certain basic skills - what I call the Four Core Competencies of Creative Expression. To get a quick fix on how strong your creativity competencies are, take the free test at http://MyCreativitySkills.com.

If you’re a manager, teacher or parent, you might also want to take the test at http://MyCreativitySkills.com/managers. That test looks at eight skill sets that help leaders bring out creativity in other people.

If you’re in charge of a business or other organization, the bottom line is that you don’t need to leave creativity to chance. With minor tweaks in policies and procedures, creativity can be systematically programmed into every level of an organization, increasing creative output in an organization by at least a factor of two. In a scientific journal, I recently reported on a project in which nearly 200 city employees in Brea, California, were given basic creativity training, transforming Brea into a City of Creativity - which translated into millions of dollars in savings and new revenues, by the way.

To get more information about my work in this area, check out the cover story in the new issue of Scientific American Mind (http://SciAmMind.com), or visit my website at http://DrEpstein.com.

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A Ph.D. of Harvard University, ROBERT EPSTEIN is a long-time researcher and professor, the former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today magazine, a contributing editor for Scientific American Mind, and a visiting scholar at the University of California San Diego. He has published 14 books, including The Big Book of Creativity Games.

Click here for an exclusive Big Idea Web Extra with Dr. Epstein!

Last year I published an article in Scientific American Mind called “The Truth About Online Dating,” in which, among other things, I was pretty negative about the biggest online dating sites. Match.com was, and still is, “The Big Bar”—a meat market a thousand miles long. And eHarmony was, and still is, “The Big Test”—pure snake oil in the form of a 40-minute personality test that promises to link you up to your Soulmate. The sad truth about eHarmony: their own data suggest that if you met every single person they referred you to, it would take you 19 years to reach a 50/50 chance of marrying one of them. The bottom line: failure, frustration, and wasted money, with the occasional success story used for promotional purposes whenever possible.

I also talked about two positive trends that I think will ultimately make online dating and matchmaking much more successful: virtual dating and community-based dating. Someday—entirely via computer—you’ll be able to meet your potential love in a virtual café on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, gaze into his or her eyes, and chat leisurely about the virtual weather. It still won’t be the same as meeting face to face, but it will be the next best thing and probably quite predictive. Researchers at MIT and elsewhere are working on the technology. Stay tuned—or wired, or wireless, as it were.

The other trend, community-based matchmaking, is a potent cure for the snake-oil test. In the real world, real, successful relationships often begin with, well—I don’t know how else to say it—intuition. Your friend, or your parents (at least in some countries), or a matchmaker just knows that you and Jane (or John) are going to hit it off. There’s no personality testing involved—just intangibles like friendship and common sense.

I’ve done this myself, and so have you, probably. When I was in graduate school, I just knew that my friend Ken would hit it off with a woman who worked in my lab. Less than a year later, they married, and the marriage has been long and happy.

And friends and family are not only good matchmakers; they’re also great firewalls. When your physical infatuation has gotten out of control, your best friend is the one who points out how pathetic that guy really is. In fact, that’s one of the principal jobs of your best friend: the reality check!

The non-clunky virtual date is still years away, but, as I reported in my article, community-based online dating is here right now. A while ago, I was asked by the creator of a new website called Engage.com to share my ideas about online dating, and I was thrilled that he was developing the community approach. He indeed developed a site that allowed you to bring your friends and family with you online for reality checks and fix-ups. I mentioned this in my article, but the service was still somewhat fledgling at that point.

Now, just over a year later, I’ve checked up on Engage.com again, and it’s way past the fledgling stage. It has about a half a million members, for one thing, and it’s fun. Within minutes of signing up, I was playing matchmaker, just like in real life. One thing in particular really struck me: When I was “voting” on potential matches, my votes were consistent with the votes of other matchmakers. In other words, when it comes to matchmaking, intuitions really do coincide, and, presumably, the better you know the people you’re matching up, the more predictive those intuitions will be.

On the down side, even while online matching is making positive strides on some fronts, there’s new snake oil out there too. Match.com’s spinoff, Chemistry.com—which promises to find your perfect match with a test inspired by some truly shoddy ideas about the brain—is especially disappointing. A recent evaluation of the site by the National Advertising Review Council concluded that there was “insufficient evidence” to support virtual all of the extravagant claims made by the site. I said as much on a television show recently. I don’t think Dr. Helen Fisher—another guest on the show and the academic guru behind Chemistry.com—was very happy with me, but I spoke the truth.

The Age Factor: What Psychological Research Tells Us About the Candidates

By ROBERT EPSTEIN

Published in the Hartford Courant, May 4, 2008

Here’s a simple exercise I’ve conducted with thousands of people over the years — students, business executives and even some politicians:

I give you 20 alphabet blocks and ask you to spell some simple words: BOX, RUN, DOG and LIP. You quickly find the letters printed on the blocks and spell each word, one after another, moving faster and more efficiently with each word.

The next word is CAT. You quickly find the C, and then the A, but you can’t immediately find the T — because, in fact, I’ve removed the blocks that have a T printed on them. You look again through all the blocks, but still no T. You start to feel frustrated, and now, with painful precision, you pick up and inspect each block very carefully, making sure you don’t miss that T.

Some people in this situation get so frustrated that they give up.

Now I bring people into the room who are unfamiliar with the exercise. I give them the blocks and say, “Please spell the word CAT with these blocks.”

They quickly find the C and then the A. Then they search for the T for a minute or two, mumble something about it not being on the blocks — and then quickly use five or six blocks to assemble a T.

The first group of people had more experience than the second group, but their experience — and, in particular, their previous successes — interfered with their ability to spell the word CAT when the circumstances changed slightly. Those with very little experience could approach the same problem with greater flexibility.

And that, in a nutshell, is what experience gets you. It’s great as long as the world continues to present you with problems that are similar to those you’ve solved before. But when the world changes too dramatically, you might be in trouble. Extensive research on experience with physicians, athletes and others, summarized recently in a volume called the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, confirms this.

Which brings me to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain. Hands down, McCain has the most experience in government: 25 years in the U.S. Congress. Clinton has been a first lady twice, but has served as an elected official only since 2001. Obama has been a U.S. senator only since 2005, but did serve as a state senator in Illinois for the seven previous years.

As for life experience, again McCain wins. He’s 71 years old, whereas Clinton is 60 and Obama only 46.

So who would make the best president? Well, other things being equal, the answer depends on what kind of world you think is coming over the next four to eight years. If the challenges you expect us to face are similar to those we’re facing now, the more experience the president has, the better. If you envision radically new challenges turning up any time soon — events like the 9/11 attack, for example — inexperience wins the day.

And then there’s the elephant in the room, one that’s so big and so scary that I hesitate to point it out. Although, as I’ve said, research reveals both advantages and disadvantages to experience, it’s far from forgiving about age, especially when people are as old as John McCain. A recent brain scanning study, for example, shows that brain size peaks at age 14 and that by the time we’re 70, our brain has shrunk to the size it was when we were 3.

And lest you think that we cram increasing brain power into that constantly shrinking brain, consider: Raw scores on intelligence tests peak between ages 13 and 15, and most kinds of memory also function best during our teens. The bottom line is that as we age, it gets increasingly harder for us to learn and master new material, which is why so many baby boomers spend so much time kicking their computers.

When you factor disease into the picture, things look even worse. By age 85, nearly half of Americans have Alzheimer’s, a devastating destroyer of cognitive abilities that can creep up gradually over a period of many years. A president in his 70s, Ronald Reagan was suffering from signs of the disease during his second term, and his memory problems were severe within three years of the time he left.

So just how experienced — and how old — do you want your president to be?

Robert Epstein is a former editor in chief of Psychology Today.  His most recent book is The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen. Now a resident of California, Epstein was born and raised in Hartford.

Letter to the editor, published in Newsweek, January 21, 2008:

Sharon Begley’s recent article in Newsweek (”The Roots of Fear,” December 24, 2007) tumbles hard into the trap that legal scholar Stephen Morse calls the “brain overclaim syndrome”—the trendy tendency to “explain” human behavior by pointing to brain circuits that light up while we’re behaving. But brain activity doesn’t explain human behavior; it’s just more activity to be explained. The minimal brain research Begley cites sheds no light on why people vote the way they do. Yes, fear can sometimes trump reason, but that was known long before brain scanning was invented. And contrary to Begley’s assertions, reason frequently overcomes fear. In fact, whether we even feel fear has much to do with how we interpret what’s happening around us. I might fear a shady character in a New York subway, but a visitor from Idaho might not know enough to be afraid. Politicians do try to play on fears to get votes, but it’s virtually always both candidates doing this. In any case, no one has ever shown that a candidate’s TV ads actually produce a significant fear reaction in a viewer. Violence-saturated Americans are more likely to yawn than cower when Rudy Giuliani reminds them, yet again, about 9/11.

Letter to the editor, published in The New York Times, February 11, 2008:

No remarkable abilities emerge suddenly at age 16 — or, for that matter, at age 18 or 21. In fact, as I show in a new book on adolescence, human cognitive abilities peak between ages 13 and 15, and American adults are no more competent than American teenagers across a wide range of competencies.

Does this mean we should lower the voting age to 13? Absolutely not. Age should simply not be part of the voting equation. It’s a stale remnant from eras that restricted voting to 21-year-old male landowners.

What we really need are individual voters who can show themselves to be competent, not who fit our demographic biases: voters who can reason and who know the basics about government, the issues and the candidates. People of any age, gender or race who can demonstrate relevant competence should be allowed to vote, and the less competent should be excluded.

Whom would we elect if the electorate were actually competent? And whom would we have never elected?

Robert Epstein
The writer, a visiting scholar at the University of California at San Diego, is former editor in chief of Psychology Today.