9/7/2024 Roger F. Malina in connection with the C4ES team.
A group of us is trying to set up a Center for the Study of Emergence within the ArtSciLab (C4ES) at the University of Texas at Dallas
https://artscilab.utdallas.edu/tag/center-for-emergence-studies
TOC:
a.Intro
B: Birth rate do longer matches death rate
C: Number of people are increasing faster than rate of younger people
D: Scientific background to understand how motivation evolves with age and experience, and how new/different motivations might emerge.
E: Personal Anecdotes
F: So What: senexoptimism ?
G. Notes
A. Introduction:
Our first C4ES study is on the emergence of age distributions in human society in ways that have never occurred before in human history. The article is in Press, led by Tina Qin with Fred Turner. Here is an excerpt:
The Senex : What is the Senex?
Many academic disciples recognize aging, senescence, geriatrics, “the elderly”, “seniors”, as important subjects. Gerontology is a recognized discipline that, in its own terms,
combines or integrates several separate areas of study. The Gerontological Society of America fosters interdisciplinary collaboration between physicians, nurses, biologists, behavioral and social scientists, psychologists, social workers, economists, policy experts, those who study the humanities and the arts, and many other scholars and researchers in aging. Geriatrics, the branch of medical science concerned with the prevention and treatment of diseases in older people, is a part of the broader field of gerontology.[1]
“Our interest in this essay is to focus on the figure of the older human being, what we call the Senex, which seems to be an archetype in all human cultures and historical periods. Our approach is emergentist, that is, it is interested in phenomena whose wholes are greater than the sum of their parts, whose origin is autopoietic and whose continued existence is self-maintaining. We are less interested in fixing what goes wrong with young people when they age, than in what grows and deepens in people more than 65 years old. While the disciplines listed in the Gerontological Society of America’s mission statement above use various versions of the analytical and reductive methods of normal science and scholarship, we offer a more synthesizing and holistic perspective on the issues surrounding the Senex. That perspective includes a historical glance at the issue itself and chooses as collaborators a group of poets from two great culture areas past and present, poets who have deeply understood the individual and collective nature of the aging process.”
In this blog I, Roger.F.Malina have chosen to explore how motivation evolves as the experiences experienced by a human increases.
The Senex, with myself as an exemplar, is not:
Looking for a better job or getting promoted.
Cruising around to get married and have children. Physical appearance matters less or differently.
Exploring the world, tourism, has lost its appeal, at least for this author. The local has become the center of my attention.
Reputation management is very different. I already have my Wikipedia page and high citation counts in google scholar.
This blog will conclude with an attempt to clarify and understand my own motivations. I have turned 74. I have signed a six-year contract with my university and will leave it in 2030 when I turn 80.
This will leave me 20 years to be motivated otherwise. Hence the interest in the neuroscience of motivation.
- Birth rate no longer is adequate to compensate for death rate
“In 2022, the average number of children under 18 per family in the United States was 1.94, a decrease from 2.33 in 19601. Around 7.01 million families had three or more children under 18 living in the household in 2021, while about 50.34 million households had no children under 18 living in the household2. In 2018, U.S. women had 1.7 children on average3. In 2022, about 9.23 million U.S. family households had their own children between three and five years of age living in the household. “
Local families do not have enough children to replace their parents when they die.
In addition:
“In 2021, 47.35 million men were never married, as compared to 41.81 million women (Duffin, 2022). And according to data from the Institute for Family Studies, in the last two decades, the number of never-married individuals has risen from 21 percent to 35 percent—a 14 percentage point increase (Wang, 2020).”
This is leading to an overall reduction of Americans over 18- this will affect the manual industries, digging and building, more than the desktop jobs.
Might this mean that we are seeing a different attitude to immigration/diasporas of younger people to Texas ? There is no evidence of this yet in the local political landscape.
C. The increasing role of older people in future societies
“The U.S. Census Bureau today released estimates showing the nation’s 65-and-older population has grown rapidly since 2010, driven by the aging of Baby Boomers born between 1946 and 1964. The 65-and-older population grew by over a third (34.2% or 13,787,044) during the past decade, and by 3.2% (1,688,924) from 2018 to 2019. The growth of this population contributed to an increase in the national median age from 37.2 years in 2010 to 38.4 in 2019, according to the Census Bureau’s 2019 Population Estimates.
This year, the United Nations expect the number of centenarians to rise to approximately 573,000 worldwide. In a few years there will be a million people over 100 on the planet.
Perhaps a large fraction are old, senile, stupid, handicapped. But perhaps there is an emerging generation of centenarians who can email and zoom call in bed.”
Fred Turner proposed that perhaps this could lead to the emergence of a new kind of “Renaissance” with a mechanism analogous to the Republic of Letters. Universities are un-necessary/unhelpful for triggering an auto-poetic Renaissance of a different type.
- Scientific background to understand how motivation evolves with age and experience, and how new/different motivations might emerge.
Just google the text to find the online reference.
i) Motivational incentives play an influential role in value-based decision-making and cognitive control.
A compelling hypothesis in the literature suggests that the brain integrates the motivational value of diverse incentives (e.g., motivational integration) into a common currency value signal that influences decision-making and behavior.
To investigate whether motivational integration processes change during healthy aging, we tested older (N=44) and younger (N=54) adults in an innovative incentive integration task paradigm that establishes dissociable and additive effects of liquid (e.g., juice, neutral, saltwater) and monetary incentives on cognitive task performance.
The results reveal that motivational incentives improve cognitive task performance in both older and younger adults, providing novel evidence demonstrating that age-related cognitive control deficits can be ameliorated with sufficient incentive motivation.
Additional analyses revealed clear age-related differences in motivational integration. Younger adult task performance was modulated by both monetary and liquid incentives, whereas monetary reward effects were more gradual in older adults and more strongly impacted by trial-by-trial performance feedback.
A surprising discovery was that older adults shifted attention from liquid valence toward monetary reward throughout task performance, but younger adults shifted attention from monetary reward toward integrating both monetary reward and liquid valence by the end of the task, suggesting differential strategic utilization of incentives.
Together these data suggest that older adults may have impairments in incentive integration, and employ different motivational strategies to improve cognitive task performance. The findings suggest potential candidate neural mechanisms that may serve as the locus of age-related change, providing targets for future cognitive neuroscience investigations.”
ii) The Behavioral Neuroscience of Motivation: An Overview of Concepts, Measures, and Translational Applications
Eleanor H. Simpson and Peter D. Balsam
Author information Copyright and License information PMC Disclaimer
The publisher’s final edited version of this article is available at Curr Top Behav Neurosci
Abstract
Motivation, defined as the energizing of behavior in pursuit of a goal, is a fundamental element of our interaction with the world and with each other.
All animals share motivation to obtain their basic needs, including food, water, sex and social interaction.
Meeting these needs is a requirement for survival, but in all cases the goals must be met in appropriate quantities and at appropriate times.
Therefore, motivational drive must be modulated as a function of both internal states as well as external environmental conditions.
The regulation of motivated behaviors is achieved by the coordinated action of molecules (peptides, hormones, neurotransmitters etc.), acting within specific circuits that integrate multiple signals in order for complex decisions to be made
In the past few decades, there has been a great deal of research on the biology and psychology of motivation. This work includes the investigation of specific aspects of motived behavior using multiple levels of analyses, which allows for the identification of the underpinning neurobiological mechanisms that support relevant psychological processes.
In this chapter we provide an overview to the volume “The Behavioural Neuroscience of Motivation”. The volume includes succinct summaries of; The neurobiology of components of healthy motivational drive, neural measures and correlates of motivation in humans and other animals as well as information on disorders in which abnormal motivation plays a major role.
Deficits in motivation occur in a number of psychiatric disorders, affecting a large population, and severe disturbance of motivation can be devastating. Therefore, we also include a section on the development of treatments for disorders of motivation.””
- Personal Anecdotes
One of the methods of our C4Es, advocated by Fred Turner, is the use of “anecdotes” to develop an argument and convince others.
Anecdote: a usually short narrative of an interesting, amusing, or biographical incident
So here goes
When I was an undergraduate at MIT, I got a summer job at the Cambridge Electron Accelerator. My first task was to put together particle detectors from plastic pieces. To do this I had a syringe with epoxy in it. On morning my hand slipped, and the epoxy went into my eye. I was taken to the emergency room.
I was de-motivated to continue in high energy particle physics.
“My next summer job was to help Profs Saul Rapaport and Hale Bradt build a small x-ray telescope to launch on a sounding rocket, devoted entirely to the observation of the X-ray emission from the Crab Nebula. The flight had been planned originally for April 3. Because of administrative difficulties, it was delayed until April 26 1990.”
So my summer job was to transcribe the data from film to punched cards and a discovery was made and published.
This led to my motivation to do a PhD in astrophysics and work eventually as Principal Investigator for the NASA extreme ultraviolet explorer satellite; we made the first human made map of the sky in that wavelength range. WOW
As a result I was invited to become Director of the Astronomical Observatory of Marseille Provence, a bureaucratic job. But during my tenure the first planet around another star, exoplanet, was discovered around another star by Swiss scientists using one of our telescopes.
My time was filled with implementing Napoleon’s rules and methods of bureaucracy. I did no research 90% of the time. I was well paid but intellectually de-motivated.
Which gets me to a final anecdote; reconnecting with former girlfriends. I am now 72 and married for 41 years to Christine. I have noticed that a joy of Senex is reconnecting with former very good friends.
Sonya Lugassy is an engineer in the architecture section; she was part of a team that redesigned/restored the Eiffel tower. We were friends when we were both teenagers and took dancing lessons. She reconnected after divorcing her husband and squabbling with her children. We meet occasionally.
Una Dora Copley was my first girlfriend after I injected epoxy into my eye. Her mother was a famous artist in Iceland who died the year before I met Una Dora. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%ADna_Tryggvad%C3%B3ttir .
Her father was Al Copley, also known in the art world as A.L. Copley: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_L._Copley
Alfred Lewin Copley (1910–1992) was a German–American medical scientist[1] and an artist at the New York School[2] in the 1950s. As an artist he worked under the name L. Alcopley. He is best known as an artist for his abstract expressionist paintings, and as a scientist for his work in the field of hemorheology.
He was a good friend of my fathers and as my father and was also a Hybrid professionally as I was to become.
Una Dora reconnected with me after her husband died and we are writing an article together.
Strange how an epoxy gun can have such consequences over decades of our life. And how increasing senescence can lead to re-emerging friendships that died for decades.
As a PhD student at UC Berkeley, in the early 70s, it was a strange time in our cultural history. I was a cocaine addict for a few years; no more never again. I experienced immersive interactive video and sound at the famous theater in San Francisco.
By accident one of my room mates was Jennie Tayloe. For some reason we went disco dancing a lot. We weren’t very good at it according to our friends; so, we took disco lessons. I learned how to throw her into the air, spin around and catch her before she hit the floor. She died recently. But those memories motivate me to take lessons in things I am not very good at.
But my interest in dancing connected me to Rejane Spitz in Rio de Janeiro during an International Astronautics Congress. I will be meeting her again soon, but not to dance, except the dance of life. She is a founding pioneer in the computer arts in Brazil, so I named her to the editorial board of the Leonardo Journal where I was Executive Editor.
I have two artificial hips, so dancing no longer motivates me. Senex effect. The body runs down quicker than the mind.
- Senexoptimism
Fred Turner suggested that the shifting balance in age demographics might lead to a new kind of “Renaissance”
The 200,000 people over 100 years old have different, but overlapping, motivations as their juniors.
Perhaps a new “Republic of Letters’ will emerge, more appropriately perhaps a “Republic of Zoom Calls”.
“The Republic of Letters (Res Publica Litterarum or Res Publica Literaria) was the long-distance intellectual community in the late 17th and 18th centuries in Europe and the Americas. It fostered communication among the intellectuals of the Age of Enlightenment, or philosophes as they were called in France. The Republic of Letters emerged in the 17th century as a self-proclaimed community of scholars and literary figures that stretched across national boundaries but respected differences in language and culture.[1] These communities that transcended national boundaries formed the basis of a metaphysical Republic. Because of societal constraints on women, the Republic of Letters consisted mostly of men.”
The Renaissance shifted our civilizations and thinking in an improved direction. We understood that the sun did not go around the earth etc.
This time the Republic of Letters will not only stretch across national boundaries but respect differences in language and culture: it will now be multi generational with the 16 years olds zooming with 100 year olds.
This time the Renaissance will be differently sexist ( women and men have different but overlapping death rates: In 2022, the difference in life expectancy between females and males was 5.4 years. So there will be slightly more women than men in the emerging Re-Renaissance.
Shakespeare’s ‘seven ages of man” will become the seven ages of men and women and….
So maybe C4ES can trigger a new Re-Renaissance in the Republic of Zoomers. Our motivation will include a) leaving a trace for future generations- without the invention of print the renaissance might not be important -hence this blog that we will print in a leather bound book. B) given our differing motivations than younger people maybe we can stand back from the noise and discover that some other sun is not orbiting around us.
- Anecdotic Poem
Senexoptimism
Who would have thought
That a gun
Filled with Epoxy
Would change the direction
Of my life
Or that hip replacements
Would replace dancing
With thinking and writing
And making trouble
With a multi-generational
Multi- disciplinary
Multi-cultural
Gang of idea thieves
And inventors
Or that the sound
Of a fountain
Would resuscitate
My memories
Of the Elskack Beck
Where my mother was born
And I learned to cross
The stream of life
On stepping stones
Some of them slippery
With epoxy
And disco dancing
Is impossible..
- Notes
With thanks and acknowledgement to the emerging C4ES team. This paper is being published as a “white paper’; the concept of the White Paper was invented by Winston Churchill and is subject to internal peer review by friends and not through academic publishing systems. Note: much of the text is copied from on line texts- I do not have permission in for white paper purposes don’t think it’s worth including a citation list. These days you can AI search a phrase or paragraph and find where I found it online.
[1] From the mission statement of the Gerontological Society of America https://www.geron.org/About-GSA#:~:text=Gerontology%20is%20the%20study%20of,from%20our%20aging%20population;%20and