The Things We Love by Aaron Ahuvia

Author:Aaron Ahuvia [AHUVIA, AARON]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2022-07-19T00:00:00+00:00

Middle Age and Later: Coasting on Autopilot

As people hit their twenties, they often cultivate grown-up tastes. For example, in my opinion, nothing goes better with a piece of chocolate cake than a glass of cold milk. But if I’m in a fancy restaurant, I’ll probably choose coffee. Milk is literally the earliest childhood taste. It just doesn’t seem appropriate in a sophisticated adult setting.

The exploratory phase that starts in the teenage years may last into a person’s thirties or forties. But our openness to new things slows down dramatically as we get close to middle age. Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky3 has shown that our tendency to stop developing tastes for new things is linked to physical changes in the brain that occur around this age. The introduction of sushi into American cuisine in the late 1980s provided Sapolsky with excellent circumstances in which to test his theory. He discovered that people who were thirty-nine years of age or older when sushi was introduced rarely developed a taste for it, while those who were thirty-eight or younger often grew into ardent sushi lovers.

Have you ever wondered why so many people are convinced that whatever music happened to be popular when they were young is the best music ever created? Sapolsky found that most people were younger than twenty when they first heard the type of music they would love for the rest of their lives. Moreover, if people are thirty-five or older when they first hear a new style of music, there is more than a 95 percent chance that they won’t like it (“That’s not music; that’s just noise!”). This was confirmed in a study by the music-streaming site Deezer, which found that the peak age for discovering new music was twenty-four and that most people stopped discovering new music around the age of thirty.

Older folks often believe that the reason they dislike new music is that it simply isn’t very good. While the music of your youth was, undoubtedly, just as great as you think it was, we live in a world bursting with far more great new stuff of all kinds than in any previous era. I’ll use music as an example, but the basic idea holds true for almost all forms of art and entertainment.

Both nature and nurture play a role in the making of a musical genius.4 On the nature side of things, there is a genetic component to musical ability, and a few people are blessed with astonishing levels of talent. The average level of innate musical ability in the population may be increasing slightly. The argument for this claim is that musical talent is positively correlated with a person’s overall IQ, and average IQ has been slowly increasing since it started being measured more than a hundred years ago, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect.5 But to be conservative, instead of saying that musical intelligence is increasing, we can assume that it has remained more or less the same. Since the population of the

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