Diet And Health Today - January 1 | Page 12

If, as Keegan argues, fifth brain development offers huge potential to address the problems we face in an increasingly complex world, then we need people in the fifth stage to keep working and to keep engaged in decision-making at all levels. Imagine a future where the current generation of over fifties keep working into their sixties, seventies and beyond (why not?). Older architects, developers and town planners can start to address the way we design housing and our cities. “Old age is like Let’s stop everything else. To designing for make a success of the car and start to design for it, you’ve got to human beings. start young.” Theodore Roosevelt A recent Guardian article by Chris Montgomery reported on a Swedish study that found that, "People who live in mono functional, cardependent neighbourhoods outside urban centres are much less trusting of other people than people who live in walkable neighbourhoods where housing is mixed with shops, services and places to work." So let's have mixed developments with apartments for single people of all ages and larger houses with gardens for families. We could create shared spaces, indoors and out, where people can sit and chat. Effective sound-proofing could allow people to have quiet when they want it but shared communal spaces could help mitigate the corrosive effects of loneliness, which is not just the preserve of the old. By designing real communities we could create synergies between the generations: an older couple living nearby might be very happy to be adoptive grand-parents and do some babysitting for hard-pressed working families. Living frenzied busy lives, living for the one or two holidays we work so hard to afford in the year is no way to live. If we made our communities more organic, more trusting and human in scale then perhaps we could create more everyday happiness for more people of all ages. moved I was by the sheer beauty of the works of art, and how haunted I remain by these thousands of years' old images. In these paintings we are witnessing the dawn of our consciousness as a species. These are people who have moved beyond the instinct to merely survive long enough to pass on their genes. Those cave dwellers were among the first human beings to be aware of the fact of their existence and the realisation that it would end; that they were alive and that they would die. It's thought that the development of the pre frontal cortex in the brain was what allowed this consciousness to develop. This change explains why human beings create art, religion, cities, technologies and culture. But as those early humans developed the capacities that have resulted in the exponential progress of our species, they also created the potential for our extinction. Robert Keegan is suggesting that many many more of us will now live long enough to reach the fifth stage of development of consciousness, and that we will do so for sound evolutionary reasons: to save Homo sapiens from extinction. If he's right, then older people will need to be much more involved in conflict resolution at all levels - interpersonal relationships, politics (national and international), justice etc. Even if he's wrong, keeping learning and innovating throughout our lives will create positive role models of ageing for the generations coming after us. Surely that is one of the most important ways to keep our own individual lives meaningful and happy while making a powerful contribution to the common good? It's not a no-brainer idea; it's a two (hemisphere) brainer idea. Many years ago I visited the cave paintings at Lascaux in France. I was surprised at just how Diet & Health Today 12