Think of the word “meridian” and its manifold meanings. It can refer to one of the many imaginary lines that circle the globe from north to south, dividing it in half, and it can denote the high point or peak of one’s powers. Middle age is like a meridian: it was imagined into existence, it can create a legion of pathways, and it marks a time when we are in our prime.
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Now and Then
Thomas Cole’s 1840 painting Voyage of Life: Manhood
Surprisingly little attention has been given to the middle years, which, for most individuals, constitute the longest segment of life.
—Midlife in the United States national study (2004)
If you want to get a sense of what middle age in the twenty-first century looks like, a good place to start is the Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where Richard Davidson is conducting research into the middle-aged brain. The $10 million lab, which Davidson helped found and now directs, is in the Waisman Center at the western end of campus. On the day of my visit, groves of upturned brown dirt with cranes and plows stand about like muddied yellow dinosaurs. A maze of concrete barriers, orange cones, and netting divide the beige-and-aqua-colored center from the surrounding construction sites.
Outside it is hot and moist, but in the windowless room where I’m lying, waiting for my brain scan, it is cold enough for a blanket.
“Comfortable?”
The voice travels through layers of stuffing, as if I were the pea under the princess’s sixteen mattresses. In my ears are two squashed yellow foam plugs, like mini marshmallows, covered by DJ-sized padded earphones. The lyrics “Ground Control to Major Tom” from David Bowie’s song “Space Oddity” suddenly pop into my head as I lean back into a clear plastic pillow filled with tiny white balls the size of peppercorns. With the turn of a valve, Michael, the lab technician, has suctioned the air out of the pillow so that the plastic encases my skull like a bonnet. Two rectangular foam pads are pushed against the top of my scalp, a further bulwark against the slightest wiggle. Even a millimeter shift will distort the scans of my brain that are produced by the large beige functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine I’m about to enter.
“Remember, don’t move,” Michael tells me.
Nikki Rute, the study coordinator for Davidson’s research on the middle-aged brain, has already given me a practice run of the procedure in another room with a computer screen and a facsimile of the machine, a square contraption shaped like the mouth of a cave with a narrow tube through the center. The Potemkin apparatus is a way to familiarize the 331 subjects who are participating in Davidson’s experiments with what will happen when they are in the real fMRI and are expected to lie motionless on their backs for two to three hours. Davidson plans to use the pictures he takes to investigate how the architecture and circuitry of the middle-aged brain affect emotional control. Some tests have shown that in younger adults the amygdala, the brain’s emotional nut, located deep within the temporal lobe, is activated when exposed to both upsetting and uplifting images. Adults in their middle and upper decades, by contrast, seem to have the ability to screen out or tamp down negative emotions; their amygdalae light up when they see positive images but ignore the disturbing ones. Davidson wants to find out more about this filtering action.
Before I enter the real brain scanner, Michael swings over a bulky set of goggles similar to those eye doctors use to adjust prescriptions. The lenses are close enough to brush my eyelashes. Michael puts my right hand around the control box and I place my fingers lightly on top of the three buttons.
“Remember, there is no right or wrong answer. Rely on your first impressions,” Nikki says. “Don’t think too much.”
Then I slide into the tunnel.
Nikki had warned me it would be loud. Even through my shrink-wrapped head, I can hear the relentless clanging, like the backhoes slowly pounding away at the construction site outside. Through the lenses, a parade of small headshots against a royal blue background appear. Anonymous Tom, Dick, and Harrys. Bald, curly-headed, mustachioed; 20-something, 40-something, 60-something men; oval- and moon-faced, blue-eyed and brown. No impish grins or curled lips, no furrowed brows or flared nostrils. They could have been posing for a driver’s license. “Please evaluate how much you think you would like the person in the photo,” the printed directions instruct. Under my right hand is the control box with buttons, which I use to register my sentiments on a scale directly beneath each photo from “very much dislike” all the way across to “very much like.” The faces make no more of an impression than a passerby during the lunchtime rush. For nearly every one, I leave the cursor dead center—no one’s face moves me one way or the other.
Next comes another series of photographs. Once again I use the button box, pressing my forefinger for negative, middle finger for neutral, and ring finger for positive. Every so often a man’s headshot will appear again, but this time I am not supposed to press any buttons while it is displayed.
The photographs whiz by every couple of seconds: a group white-water rafting; a corpse buried in a pit; a woman stuffing her mouth with potato chips; a crashed car. Positive. Negative. Negative. Negative.
Another headshot appears, one of the expressionless men.
Inside the machine, a doughnut-shaped magnet produces an electromagnetic field that passes through my body, stimulating hydrogen atoms that give off radio signals. These signals are then collected by a special scanner and turned into images that Nikki and Michael can watch on a monitor in the other room. Though I don’t press any buttons, they can see where the most neural activity is occurring—where the lights go on in my brain.
Measuring someone’s emotional resilience is tricky. It’s not as if you can scan a person’s brain the moment she is getting fired or he is dumped by a girlfriend. For his midlife research, Davidson and his team had to devise an experiment to capture emotional responses. The series of photographs I was shown, some gruesome and sad, others uplifting and funny, were designed to do just that.
These images help to make up the International Affective Pictures System, or IAPS, a series of color slides that serve as a standard reference for measuring subtle shifts in emotion. Through the years, hundreds of volunteers have looked at and rated the images—cemeteries, starving children, serene sunsets, a coiled snake, a couple kissing, bunnies—on a scale from pleasant to unpleasant and calm to excited. The images that elicited the most uniform responses—whether positive, negative, or neutral—from a broad range of people were selected for the IAPS series.
You expect someone to respond negatively to pictures of hungry children, mutilated bodies, or wrecked homes. But what Davidson and his team were interested in was the duration of the negative reaction. Are you able to quickly shut off the spigot of bad feelings or do they drip into your view of other things, inciting a negative response to an image that you might otherwise view benignly? That is the purpose of the Tom-Dick-and-Harry headshots I was shown, those variously aged men with blank expressions. Let’s say you are neutral, as I was, about these images. What happens when you see the same face repeatedly flashed right after looking at photographs of a cadaver buried in mud, a hypodermic needle stuck into a pile of feces, or a crashed car? Is there a hangover from the negative photographs that influences your judgment and causes you to rate those completely unremarkable faces more negatively than before? What about the positive photographs? Do they also have a hangover effect? As Davidson and his team track the electrical activity in a subject’s brain, they also examine the brain’s anatomy and measure pulse rate, blood pressure, bone density, and cortisol levels, an indicator of stress. They want to find out if people who have the most difficulty containing their negative emotions also have the most ailments. Just as someone with high blood pressure can reduce the risk of heart disease with early treatment, Davidson wants to test whether learning to control stress can reduce the risk of hypertension, type 2 diabetes, atherosclerosis, and other
stress-related maladies. He thinks the answer is yes. The more quickly someone can recover from a negative experience—whether witnessing an accident or getting bawled out by the boss—the better one’s physical health will be.
After I watch a series of photographs, Michael asks how I’m doing. “Fine,” I answer. He reminds me not to move, saying that the next scan takes seven minutes.
“Is there anything special I am supposed to think about?” No, he replies.
“Can I close my eyes?” Yes.
I wish I had thought to ask which part of my brain my silently humming “Ground Control to Major Tom” was causing to flash.
The Manhattan Project of Middle Age
Richard Davidson’s experiments are part of the pathbreaking research now known as Midlife in the United States. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation agreed to finance the project in 1989 as the vanguard of postwar babies were reaching their middle years. Bill Clinton, the first boomer president, was planning his run for the White House, 40-something masters of the universe were settling into corner suites, and middle-aged protagonists like Murphy Brown and Frasier had carved out a home on the small screen when MacArthur gathered some of the best minds in the country to map the landscape of midlife.
Beneath the monumental enterprise is a simple notion that middle age is the pivot around which society is structured. “People in midlife raise the children and care for the elderly,” Orville Gilbert Brim Jr., the project’s founder and first director, explained, “and when they succeed, they carry the young and the old along with them.”
Given the number of poets and philosophers, self-help authors and filmmakers who have devoted verse and song to the middle years, it may be surprising to learn that only a generation ago, middle age managed to escape systematic scientific study. As Brim declared in language that brings to mind the Enterprise’s cosmic mission on Star Trek, middle age “is the last uncharted territory in human development.”
“No one knew what was going on in that world,” said Brim, who prefers “Bert” to “Orville.” Much of what we understood about middle age came indirectly from studies focused on children or the elderly, like a sideways reflection in a mirror. With a $9.4 million grant from MacArthur, Brim and his eleven colleagues agreed to throw out the whole tangle of assumptions that had grown up around this period—the expected dread or restlessness, the looming fear of death. “Millions of persons make decisions about their lives based on unsupported beliefs and imperfect knowledge . . . that are transmitted from one generation to the next as our cultural legacy of falsehood and myth about midlife,” he reported. His team started with a clean slate to investigate “the who, what, when, where, and why of midlife events and the beliefs people hold about them.”
They established what could be considered the Manhattan Project of middle age by gathering extensive information through large-scale surveys and in-depth interviews about what Americans in their middle years think, feel, and do every day. The researchers wanted to find out if—and how—one’s personality, mental health, brainpower, stresses, and attitudes shift in midlife. What is the impact of education, income, intelligence, background, family structure, work, friends, religion, genetics, race, and sex? Why are some individuals more resilient than others? By looking at how middle-agers negotiate the challenges of midlife, they hoped to learn what caused people to flourish or fail in the middle years and beyond, and whether anything could be done to alter that process.
The breadth and depth of the project, dubbed MIDMAC, were unprecedented. Throughout most of the twentieth century, social scientists and medical researchers were guilty of defining the “average” American as a middle-class white man. As for the relatively small niche of investigations devoted to midlife, nearly all of the significant ones involved men studying men. “Considering the major studies on adult development at midlife, it seems only men survive past the age of 40,” a scholarly assessment from 1997 dryly observed. MacArthur recruited nearly 7,200 men and women between the ages of 25 and 74 so that middle-agers could be compared with those younger and older. In the mix were hundreds of twins and siblings to help researchers sort out biological and environmental differences.
What distinguished the MacArthur group’s approach was its attempt to knit together various disciplines—psychology, anthropology, economics, biology, sociology, and more. “No single component of aging can be understood without reference to others,” a report explained. A chemical in the brain may be the cause of someone’s depression, which may in turn be the reason he withdraws from family and friends. A hard-charging, controlling type A personality may be more susceptible to coronary disease. Later on, a move to a nursing home, where she is cut off from familiar surroundings and a mix of age groups, may hasten physical and psychological deterioration.
The team also embraced a novel conceptual approach to assessing health and happiness in middle age. Traditionally, physicians and psychologists have defined success in terms of what was missing: health was a lack of illness and disease; a well-adjusted psyche meant an absence of depression and dysfunction. Middle age begins, one cultural critic declared, the moment you think of yourself as “Not-Young.” MacArthur, by contrast, was interested not merely in what was missing but in what was present. Rather than define middle age by its deficits—the end of youth and fertility, decreased stamina and flexibility—MIDMAC investigated what ingredients contribute to feeling fulfilled and purposeful. Researchers wanted to know what a half-full glass contained as well as what had spilled out of it.
Carol Ryff, a member of the MacArthur network and the director of the Institute on Aging at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, developed a list of eighty-four questions to measure well-being and divided them into six broad categories: personal growth (having new experiences that challenge how you think about yourself); autonomy (having confidence in your opinions even if they are contrary to the general consensus); supportive social relationships; self-regard (liking most aspects of your personality); control of your life; and a sense of purpose. The questionnaire was meant to capture more than the fleeting pleasures of a few beers. It was designed to gauge whether an individual was also functioning at full capacity and flourishing. The ancient Greeks called it eudaimonia, and midlife researchers and positive psychologists have adopted the term to refer to the kind of profound satisfaction and meaning one derives from raising children, training for an Olympic event, completing a college degree, or helping your neighbors rebuild after a disaster. As Ryff said, “Sometimes things that really matter most are not conducive to short-term happiness.” Dirty diapers, screaming tantrums, and sleepless nights are not particularly pleasurable on a day-to-day basis; nonetheless, most people consider children a source of deep happiness, of eudaimonia.
With this framework in place, the MacArthur team’s first task was to create a comprehensive database on middle-aged Americans. Starting in 1994, thousands of subjects answered telephone interviews and filled out lengthy forms that asked:
Are you sad, nervous, restless, fidgety, calm, satisfied, curious, optimistic, cheerful, creative, hardworking, softhearted, responsible, outspoken, active, careless, broad-minded, talkative, sophisticated, adventurous?
Are you bothered by cold, heat, loud noise?
Do you talk about your problems to a rabbi, priest, therapist, social worker, doctor? Attend meetings for alcoholics, addicts, people with eating disorders, widows, empty nesters, cancer sufferers?
Do you have pain when you have sex; do you leak urine?
Did you confide in your mother; did she love you; did she punish you; did she understand you; did she push, grab, or slap you; did your father? Did you stomp out of a room when angry or sulk?
Do you feel obligated to serve on a jury, raise the child of a close friend who died, call your parents regularly, give money to a needy friend, testify in court about an accident you witnessed, collect contributions for heart research, pay more in taxes so those worse off than you would be helped?
How much do you drink, smoke, eat, sleep, worry, tremble, get the chills, get hot flashes?
How often do you say hello to your neighbors; how often does your family get on your nerves?
Have you ever been born again; have you ever been catheterized; have you ever been on welfare?
How would you rate sex you have now; ten years ago; how do you think it will be in ten years?
Even as the surveys were being administered, the team updated its questionnaires. In the early 1990s, for example, the public discussions of menopause surrounding the publication of Gail Sheehy’s The Silent Passage and Germaine Greer’s The Change: Women, Aging and Menopause reminded researchers that they had neglected to address this universal event. All in all, respondents answered a hundred pages’ worth of detailed questions, revealing their most intimate feelings, embarrassing behaviors, physical idiosyncrasies, and emotional tics. The nearly two thousand twins who participated received little packets instructing them to gently scrape the inside of their cheeks and mail back the results for DNA testing.
Almost 1,500 of the participants sat through additional telephone interviews eight nights in a row to enumerate the precise kinds of stresses they faced each day. Another group of 750 subjects answered detailed questions about turning points and crises in their lives as researchers scanned for hints that might forecast such events in advance. Other, smaller clusters sat through extended interviews to talk about social responsibility, their strategies for handling stress, and how they defined “the good life.”
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