OK. Let’s tell a story about two groups of men in their seventies and eighties, in vans.
They are driven two hours north to a sprawling old monastery in New Hampshire, and dropped off 22 years earlier, in 1959. Yes, 22 years earlier, in 1959.
The group who went first stayed for one week and were asked to pretend they were young men, living in the 1950s.
The second group, who arrived the week afterward, were told to stay in the present and simply reminisce about that era.
Both groups were surrounded by mid-century mementos—1950s issues of Life magazine and the Saturday Evening Post, a black-and-white television, a vintage radio—and they discussed the events of the time: the launch of the first U.S. satellite, Castro’s victory ride into Havana, Nikita Khrushchev and the need for bomb shelters.
…Before and after the experiment, both groups of men took a battery of cognitive and physical tests, and after just one week, there were dramatic positive changes across the board. …Both groups were stronger and more flexible. Height, weight, gait, posture, hearing, vision—even their performance on intelligence tests had improved. Their joints were more flexible, their shoulders wider, their fingers not only more agile, but longer and less gnarled by arthritis.
But the men who had acted as if they were actually back in 1959 showed significantly more improvement. Those who had impersonated younger men seemed to have bodies that actually were younger.
Boy oh boy. There oughta be a boomer rejuvenator resort in every county!
tip to Deric Bownds