Aging Is a Premature Cognitive Commitment

In a priming experiment, where people are subconsciously primed with an idea, 153 people were asked to do memory tests after being primed with certain words. When the participants then did memory tests, all the adults primed with the old words fared much worse than the ones primed with the more positive words. The scientist wrote that if older people are treated like they are competent, productive members of society, then they perform that way too. It's not just our own attitudes and how we treat ourselves that are important, but how we treat other people. In the next chapter, we'll see how what we believe can be so powerful it can affect our ability to heal. We hope you'll join us