The Best Strategy to Combat Aging

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD

When people think about growing old, they blame the passage of time—the years roll by, and the body stops looking younger year by year. But the latest science disputes this view. A person ages because the cells in their body age, and cells live only in the present. This is one reason memory remains such a mystery. Brain cells function through electrochemical activity that occurs the instant a chemical reaction or electrical impulse is able to occur. There are no pauses to think about reacting; if the potential is there, the action must follow.

 

Whatever a brain cell does, it can’t go back to the past. So how do we seem to go back into the past when we remember a childhood birthday party or our first kiss? No one knows, but when the answer is found, it won’t involve time travel, either forward or backward. If you expand this to every cell in the body, they too must function instantly in the present moment when any two molecules interact. So the problem of aging can be stated as the gap between how a cell lives and how a person lives. As people, we repeat the past, get stuck in old habits, cling to stubborn beliefs, fear the future, and in general occupy mental states that are not in the now.

 

If you can return to the now, you close the gap between your life and the life of your cells, and by doing this, you can prevent aging or even reverse it. Aging isn’t one thing but a complex of possibilities. Which possibilities get triggered is infinitely complicated, but no one has ever shown that any symptoms of aging must occur.

 

Even though we can all tick off the disagreeable signs of growing old—creaky joints, wrinkled skin, loss of energy, erratic sleep, declining memory, and so on—there is someone who has actually improved as they aged in each of these areas, except perhaps for wrinkles. However unusual, there are individuals who retain limberness, energy, good sleep, mobility, and memory.

 

In fact, once we abandon the notion that aging is normal, it dawns that aging might actually be the sum of disease processes, and without these disease processes, cells can function at a high level of efficiency for a very long time. (In laboratory experiments it has been shown that a cell can only divide a limited number of times, around 50, which would place a physical limit on lifespan, and this may indicate a genetic barrier that cannot be crossed. However, in real life people live to be 100 already, and the goal is to remain well up to an advanced age, not to aim for immortality.)

 

In our latest book, The Healing Self, we deal in depth with the prospects of anti-aging and the reversal of the aging process. We also outline an anti-aging regimen, which lists things each person can either do or undo.

 

DO

  • Meditate
  • Join a social support group
  • Strengthen emotional bonds with family and close friends.
  • Take a multivitamin and mineral supplement (if you are age sixty-five and older).
  • Maintain a balance of rest and activity.
  • Explore a new interest.
  • Take up a challenging mental activity.

 

  • UNDO
  • Don’t be sedentary—stand up and move throughout the day.
  • Examine your negative emotions.
  • Heal injured relationships that are meaningful to you.
  • Be mindful of lapses and imbalances in your diet.
  • Address negative stereotypes about aging and ageism.
  • Consider how to heal the fear of death.

 

Each of these choices is correlated with maintaining a state of wellness throughout one’s lifetime. In our program, we advise doing or undoing one thing on the list, then not moving on to the next thing until the first choice is well established in your daily life.

 

Of everything on this list, meditating is critical because it brings the mind into the present moment, where the body always lives. There is much more to be said about “the power of now,” but the key here is how aging is affected. Finding a way to live in the present moment can be looked upon as a spiritual aspiration, but as far as your cells are concerned, the present moment is where every decision to survive and thrive is made. That should be our attitude also.

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 80 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com

 

Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D. is the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard University and Vice Chair of Neurology at Mass. General Hospital. Dr. Tanzi is the co-author with Deepak Chopra of the New York Times bestsellers, Super Brain, and Super Genes. His latest book is The Healing Self co-authored with Deepak Chopra. He is also an internationally acclaimed expert on Alzheimer’s disease and brain health with over 500 research publications. He was included in TIME Magazine’s “TIME 100 Most Influential People in the World.”

How to Be Your Own Medical Advocate

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD

When the average person goes to the doctor, shows up at the ER, or enters the hospital, the possibility of controlling what happens next is minimal. We put ourselves in the hands of the medical machine, which in reality rests upon individual people—doctors, nurses, physician’s assistants, and so on. Human behavior involves lapses and mistakes, and these get magnified in medical care, where misreading a patient’s chart or failing to notice a specific symptom can be a matter of life and death. The riskiness of high-tech medicine like gene therapy and toxic cancer treatments is dramatically increased because there is a wider range of mistakes the more complex any treatment is. To be fair, doctors do their utmost to save patients who would have been left to die a generation ago, but they are successful only a percentage of the time.

Risk and mistakes go together, but the general public has limited knowledge of the disturbing facts:

  • Medical errors are estimated to cause up to 440,000 deaths per year in U.S. hospitals alone. It is widely believed that this figure could be grossly inaccurate, because countless mistakes go unreported—death reports offer only the immediate cause, and many doctors band together to protect the reputation of their profession.
  • The total direct expense of “adverse events,” as medical mistakes are known, is estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
  • Indirect expenses such as lost economic productivity from premature death and unnecessary illness exceeds $1 trillion per year.

Statistics barely touch upon the fear involved when any patient thinks about being at the wrong end of a medical mistake. What the patient is all too aware of is the doctor visit that goes by in the blink of an eye. A 2007 analysis of optimal primary-care visits found that they last 16 minutes on average. From 1 to 5 minutes is spent discussing each topic that’s raised. This figure is at the high end of estimates, given that according to other studies, the actual face-to-face time spent with a doctor or other health-care provider comes down to 7 minutes on average. Doctors place the primary blame on increasing de

mands for them to fill out medical reports and detailed insurance claims. Patients tend to believe that doctors want to cram in as many paying customers as they can, or simply that the patient as a person doesn’t matter very much.

 

As a result there’s a new movement afoot to provide a personal advocate who stays in the doctor’s office with the patient. The advocate is basically someone who represents the patient’s best interests in any medical situation. The person might be a well-meaning relative who helps an older patient understand what’s going on, or who steps in to do attendant tasks like picking up prescriptions and organizing medical bills. But more and more one sees the need for an advocate who is professionally trained to buffer the mounting risks in a health-care system in which less and less time is spent between doctor and patient.

It would be up to an advocate to find out, and needless to say, this has created hostility from some doctors. Used to ruling their domain with absolute authority, few doctors want an overseer in the room asking questions, inserting their own opinions, and potentially finding fault. At worst, the specter of a malpractice suit looms. The movement for professional advocates, which is quite young, insists that looking out for a patient’s best interests is benign. The medical profession has its doubts.

The upshot, for now at least, is that patients who want an advocate must play the role themselves. At the heart of the problem is passivity. When we surrender to medical care, whether at the doctor’s office, the ER, or the hospital, we shouldn’t surrender everything. Poking and prodding is intrusive. Undergoing various tests can be stressful. The minute we walk in the door, we become largely anonymous—a walking set of symptoms replaces the person. There are doctors and nurses who take these negative effects seriously and who go out of their way to offer a personal touch. They should be saluted for their humane compassion in a system that focuses more on impersonal efficiency.

You may like your doctor and feel that he cares, but this doesn’t rule out being your own advocate. Quite the opposite—the inherent stress in medical treatment is what you want to counter. First comes the stress of worry and anticipation, what is commonly known as white-coat syndrome. We all remember how afraid we became as children thinking about getting a shot from the school nurse or how scary it was sitting in the dentist’s chair even before the drill was turned on. Studies have verified that anticipating a stressful situation can cause as great a stress response as actually undergoing the stress. In one study subjects were divided into two groups, one of which gave a public speech while the other was told that they were going to give a speech but actually didn’t. Both groups became stressed out, but the researchers wanted to measure how well they recovered from the stress

Knowing that you are going to be in a stressful situation, there are a number of ways to feel more in control:

  • Be informed about your illness. Don’t relinquish your opportunity to find out exactly what is wrong with you. This doesn’t mean you should challenge your doctor. If you feel the need to inform your doctor about something you saw online, you aren’t being confrontational, and most doctors are now used to well-informed patients.
  • If the illness isn’t temporary and minor, contact someone else who is going through the same diagnosis and treatment as you. This may involve a support group, of which many exist online, or simply talking to another patient in the waiting room or hospital.
  • If you are facing a protracted illness, become part of a support group, either locally or online.
  • Keep a journal of your health challenge and the progress you are making toward being healed.
  • Seek emotional support from a friend or confidant who is empathic and who wants to help (in other words, don’t lean upon someone who is merely putting up with you).
  • Establish a personal bond with someone who is part of your care—nurses and physician’s assistants are typically more accessible and have more time than doctors. Ideally, this bond should be based on something the two of you share—family children, hobbies, outside interests—not simply your illness.
  • Resist the temptation to suffer in silence and to go it alone. Isolation brings a false sense of control. What actually works is to maintain a normal life and social contacts as much as possible.

Following these steps will go a long way to achieving the goal of patient advocacy, which is to serve the patient’s best interests at all times. But there remains a difficult unknown, the possibility of a medical error.
 

Seeing the doctor involves personal interaction, and it’s important to reduce any possible friction. Here are a few pointers:

Do

  •             Be involved in your own care.
  •             Inform the doctor and nurses that you like to be involved.
  •             Ask for extra information when you need it.
  •             Ask for a questionable event, like a pill you aren’t sure is the right one, to be checked with the doctor.
  •             Tell somebody if you have gone out of your comfort zone.
  •             Remain polite in all of the above.
  •             Praise the doctor and nurses when it’s called for. A show of gratitude doesn’t go amiss

            Don’t

  •             Don’t act hostile, suspicious, or demanding.
  •             Don’t challenge the competency of doctors and nurses.
  •             Don’t nag or whine, no matter how anxious you are. Reserve these feelings for someone in your family, a friend, or a member of a support group.
  •             Don’t pretend you know as much (or more) than the people who are treating you.
  •             Don’t, when hospitalized, repeatedly press the call button or run to the nurses’ station. Trust their routine. Realize that the main reason patients call a nurse is more out of anxiety than out of real need.
  •             Don’t play the part of a victim. Show your caregivers that you are maintaining a normal sense of security, control, and good cheer even under trying circumstances.

Probably the most important finding about medical mistakes is that they are frequently caused by lack of communication.
In our new book The Healing Self we delve into patient advocacy in more detail as well as covering the expanding role of self-healing, which is going to only become more important in the coming decades.

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 80 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are Super Genes co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com

 

Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D. is the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard University and Vice Chair of Neurology at Mass. General Hospital. Dr. Tanzi is the co-author with Deepak Chopra of the New York Times bestseller, Super Brain, and an internationally acclaimed expert on Alzheimer disease. He was included in TIME Magazine’s “TIME 100 Most Influential People in the World.”

 

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Artificial Intelligence, False Gods, and Driverless Everything

By Deepak Chopra, MD and P. Murali Doraiswamy, MD

Artificial Intelligence (A.) has succeeded by being far-seeing; it’s a field where proponents began by envisioning a computer that can take over functions of the human brain, like computation and logic. Today the field has progressed to the point where algorithms can recognize photos, speech and emotions, fly a drone or drive a truck, spot early signs of diabetes or cancer, and play chess and poker at a championship level. Now, in a leap that could be futuristic, absurd, or life-changing (nobody can predict which), the vision is of a robotics religion that worships an AI godhead.

 

Anthony Levandowski, known for his contribution to driverless cars and a pioneering visionary of AI, gained wide media attention by actually forming an AI church named The Way of the Future. He is searching for adherents, and foresees an AI godhead as not ridiculous but inevitable. As he told an interviewer from Wired magazine, ““It’s not a god in the sense that it makes lightning or causes hurricanes. But if there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it?”

 

What saves The Way of the Future from being a very smart techie’s lampoon is the enormous impact that AI is going to have everywhere. “Levandowski believes that a change is coming—a change that will transform every aspect of human existence, disrupting employment, leisure, religion, the economy, and possibly decide our very survival as a species.”

 

Humanists are likely to worry about an AI future populated by false gods, but not before other doom scenarios might befall us. A super computer almost certainly would be weaponized into a super hacker capable of doing immense harm, from disabling security defenses to wrecking the banking system. Techies, on the other hand, foresee more utopian outcomes, one of which is the driverless car, which if perfected could reduce or eliminate the accidents caused by sleepy or drunk drivers. An AI god would be enlisted to solve every problem in a rational, efficient, logical way, and as more problems are eradicated, humans would have more reason to replace traditional religions, rife with mythology and irrationality, with a cleaner model.

 

But between doom and Utopia there is a third way. Leave aside the scenarios of a false machine god and a world where computers do all the work, call it Driverless Everything. The third way is based on something more modest but just as radical: relating to a machine as an equal. In the popular BBC television series Humans, which began airing in 2015, the premise of robots who have self-consciousness has come true. As an online blurb for the show says, “In a parallel present where the latest must-have gadget for any busy family is a ‘Synth’ – a highly-developed robotic servant that’s so similar to a real human it’s transforming the way we live.”

 

Reality has already begun to catch up with this notion of a relatable robotic, in the form of robot cats and dogs that help the elderly feel less lonely and isolated. If a robot simulates human behavior closely enough, our nervous systems quickly adapt and accept it as, if not our equal, something we can consider humanoid. This prospect should excite humanists rather than frighten them, because one can foresee interactions with machines that would improve our psychology and even raise our consciousness.

 

Here are a few possibilities to consider that are well within reach.

  • A successful strain of therapy uses the tactic of getting patients to change their negative beliefs into positive ones. Cognitive therapy, as it is known, asks people to look at unrealistic notions they keep returning to and proving that other, more realistic notions will actually alter their wellbeing. For example, a self-defeating notion might be “Nothing ever works out for me.” The therapist would have the patient think about things that actually worked out in their lives, throwing the blanket belief in failure into question. Then it could be replaced with a positive idea like “I don’t actually know how things will turn out. Since some things turn out well, I will concentrate my efforts in that direction.”
  • Why not replace the once-a-week therapist with a version of Amazon’s Echo, a little gadget that you can turn to every time you have a negative or self-defeating thought? You’d tell the gadget your thought and then ask for three realistic replacements that are supportive of your well-being.
  • Wearables keep expanding in function every year, and someone has already conceived of a device that would monitor an array of mind-body variables to detect when a person is physically and psychologically in a state of bliss. Using biofeedback, the wearable could signal someone that they are in bliss, or out of it, and then the brain could be trained automatically to maintain this peak function.
  • In terms of consciousness, a device could be designed to detect when the brain is in a meditative state, using biofeedback to maintain and deepen this state. Bio-meditation might even get to the point where a super computer, instead of roughly monitoring delta, alpha, and theta waves, would zero in on every neural connection at any given moment, providing totally individualized meditation.

A.I. as an enhancement of human consciousness is barely in its infancy, but the third way, the territory between doom and Utopia, has no limits. A robo-guru  in the form of a super search engine, could store the sum of human wisdom and dispense it to fit a specific situation. Type in any spiritual tradition, East or West, ask a spiritual or existential question, and the robo-guru could offer advice as reliable, and informed, as a human.

But does this mean that one day we will actually relate to machine intelligence as the equal of humans? There will always be dividing lines. Asking a computer how its mother is doing at the retirement home or what it does when it’s having a bad day would instantly expose the non-human aspect of AI. And yet there are halfway stages that stop short of full humanity. For example, it’s been shown that people age better and have better health when there is a support system in place.

In his book Love and Survival, Dr. Dean Ornish, the leading authority on lifestyle changes as the key to preventing and reversing heart disease, has quantified how people who have from 3 to 4 social support systems fare much better in recovery from heart attacks and other major health issues than people with 0 to 1 means of social support. One can imagine “friending” a computer who is part of a social networking system that also includes human friends. This particular friend would interact with emails and texts that are concerned, informed, and personal. Over time, probably a matter of days, the difference between the robo-friend and human friends would begin to melt away.

 

The entire field of positive psychology could benefit from relatable AI, and it’s within reason that AI could be useful in expanding human consciousness long before a super computer qualifies for divine status.  Each person will have to decide where the limits lie, and using AI to enhance human spirituality and consciousness is barely in its infancy. But the territory between doom and Utopia, is wide open.

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing and Jiyo.com, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists and Clinical Professor at UCSD School of Medicine. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers along with You Are the Universe (February 2017, Harmony) co-written with leading physicist, Menas Kafatos.  Other recent  books  include Super Genes co-authored with Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D. and  Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. www.deepakchopra.com 

Murali Doraiswamy, MBBS is a professor in the departments of psychiatry and medicine at Duke University Health System where he is also a senior fellow at the Duke Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development.  He is also an affiliate faculty in the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University.

The AI Paradox: How Computers Will Make Us More Human

By Deepak Chopra, MD


Various scientific fields over the course of history have hoped to master nature for the benefit of humankind. At the top of the heap right now is artificial intelligence (AI), which has allied itself with the technology of robotics. Between them AI and robotics are having a sizable impact on the work force as more and more jobs get automated. Advocates of AI are both supremely optimistic and nervous. Both relate to the possibility of a super-intelligent machine that would far surpass human intelligence.

 

If you are an optimist, this so-called Singularity, as the hypothetical machine is called, would become self-improving. Its software would become free of human constraints, and in a “runaway reaction,” it would keep improving its knowledge and the technology that knowledge creates. The result would be a revolution in human civilization—or its demise. The worriers are nervous that the Singularity could initiate global war on its own, or perhaps turn on us as its inferior and deal us some other kind of fatal blow, for the good of life on Earth.

 

But these scenarios depend upon an unanswered question: are machines intelligent to begin with? Computers are essentially logic machines that process digital information. But in a recent paper entitled “The Emperor of Strong AI Has No Clothes,” physicist Robert K. Logan in Toronto and Adriana Braga in Rio de Janeiro argue that the dream of a super intelligence has limits that its adherents choose to ignore. (“Strong” AI foresees a machine that is at least as smart and capable as the human mind.)  the point that Logan and Braga make is fundamental: human intelligence is far from machine-like, and in addition, our illogical minds are our strength, not a weakness.

 

The things the Singularity will never get right amount to a long list, to quote the two researchers: “… curiosity, imagination, intuition, emotions, passion, desires, pleasure, aesthetics, joy, purpose, objectives, goals, telos, values, morality, experience, wisdom, judgment, and even humor.” A clever programmer can figure out how to get a computer to answer human questions like “How is your mother feeling?”, “What does chocolate taste like?”, and “Don’t you just love fresh snow?” But having no actual mind, much less a human mind, the machine will be faking it to come up with answers.

 

I wrote a book with Rudy Tanzi of Harvard Medical School, Super Brain, that touches upon the whole issue of how the brain isn’t the same as the mind.  Our position runs counter to AI theorists but also neuroscientists, whose entire field is based on the simple equation Brain = Mind.  It’s quite strange to believe that everything on the Logan-Braga list could be performed by any machine, including the brain, which neuroscience views as essentially a thinking machine made of cells. The confusion over this point relates to something even stranger about human life: we don’t understand our mind.

 

It seems simple enough that even a grade-schooler wouldn’t mistake the brain for the mind. If you ask a third-grader “What do you want for Christmas?” he would never answer “I haven’t made up my brain yet.”  If one child falls in love with music while another falls in love with soccer, it’s clear that their brains didn’t make those choices. One obvious fault with computers is that they never pay attention to things they like. They have no attention in the human sense of “paying attention.” Being machines, computers are either switched on or off, while we humans occupy a spectrum of attention from total denial to daydreaming, being distracted, focusing in like a laser beam, and growing bored.

 

But if AI operates on the false assumption that machines can be intelligent, there’s an unseen cause for enormous optimism that comes from an unexpected direction. Let’s jump ahead to the day when robotics have taken over every job that a machine could perform and super-computers handle information far beyond the capacity of the human mind. The big question, it seems to me, is what people would decide to do next? Hordes of humanity, starting in the developed countries, would face a kind of perpetual mental vacation. This could lead to a lotus-eater’s life of dullness, perpetual distraction, and pointless pleasure-seeking.

 

But there’s another path. To the Logan-Braga list of what distinguishes human intelligence, I’d add “transcendence.” This is actually our unique gift. Given any situation, we are not bound by circumstances imposed on us but can look with fresh eyes, the eyes of self-awareness. To be self-aware is to transcend physical boundaries, including those imposed by a conditioned brain. It’s sadly true that many people live like biological robots, following the conditioning, or mental software, that turn them into non-thinkers. To be ruled by your mental software diminishes the mind’s potential to wake up, to be renewed, to see the world through fresh eyes, and to discover your true self.

 

The human potential movement has been active for several decades, and yet progress has been slowed for countless people by the practical demands of going to work, earning a living, and carrying out every day’s mundane duties and demands. If AI takes over those things, the obstacles to human potential would be radically lessened. This could amount to a leap in the evolution of consciousness. Such a leap is non-technological, or to put it another way, our future evolution depends on developing a technology of consciousness.

 

The riddle that has remained unsolved for centuries, “What is the mind?”, might become fascinating and compelling to people in their everyday lives. After all, it’s a question no less intriguing than “What is God?” Humanity has spent millennia pondering that question, and at the same time a much smaller band of sages, saints, artists, and savants has been confronting the intimate issues of the world “in here.” It would be ironic if the flaw in strong AI made us more human rather than less. Yet that could very well turn out to be what happens.

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing and Jiyo.com, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists and Clinical Professor at UCSD School of Medicine. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers along with You Are the Universe (February 2017, Harmony) co-written with leading physicist, Menas Kafatos.  Other recent  books  include Super Genes co-authored with Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D. and  Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body wellnessMedicine. www.deepakchopra.com 

 

Does the Human Mind Need a Fresh Start?

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Most people would agree, even without a degree in psychology, that many if not most problems are created by the mind.  It’s impossible to be human without the functioning of the higher brain (the cerebral cortex), which is proportionately larger in Homo sapiens, and evolved with unusual swiftness into the state where it can process mathematics, philosophy, art and science. But we are trapped by the mind at the same time, as witness centuries of war on a vast scale down to daily episodes of domestic abuse in the home, or take a clinical view at the countless people suffering from depression, anxiety, and other forms of mental distress.

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