Steven Kotler: How to Stay Sharp, Strong, and Healthy at Any Age | Mental Health | YAPClassic

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What inspired Steven Kotler to study peak performance aging?

Hala Taha 1:56
And so I'd love to understand why his story was so shocking to you. How did he dispel the typical, you know, thoughts around traditional aging? And how did he inspire you to study peak performance aging?
Steve 2:09
So, you know, books have a lot of origin stories. There's like 11 different things that come together. I've been working, researching, looking at the field of peak performance for a while in a totally unrelated project, right? I was going to write a mystery novel and I wanted a cat burglar as a character who was going to steal musical instruments. Who made the rarest musical instruments in history? Oh, it's Stradivarius. And then I found, figured out what you mentioned, which is he made two of the rarest and most expensive musical instruments in his 90s. And I went, well, wait a minute. Everything I've been told about physical abilities is like the older myth about aging, which most of us believe, and I believed at the time of this, is what you could call the long, slow rot theory. It's the idea that all of our mental skills and our physical skills, they decline over time. There's nothing we can do to stop the slide.
Steve 2:56
So included in those skills, physical skills would be fast twitch muscle response, fine motor performance, dexterity, all this stuff you would need to make a violin or a viola in your 90s, along with like expertise and wisdom and all that, like cognitive abilities and IQ. It sort of paused me and I was like, well, wait a minute. If this is true, either Stradivarius is like the one in a billion or most of what we've been told about aging is wrong. I had already been looking at other aspects of it, but it really sort of lit a fire under me to really investigate our physical abilities and what happened to them over time. I've been looking at the cognitive stuff for a while. It's very related to flow, how we age, flow plays a big role there. So this is not new territory to me. The physical side was like, holy crap, could this possibly be true? And it is true. It's true across the board. Every one of our physical skills our use it or lose it skills. And the research is really clear. We don't stop using these skills, both physical and mental.

Can physical skills be retained with age?

Steve 3:57
We can hang on to them, even advance them far, far later into life than anybody thought possible.

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