Positive Aging: Creativity and Strengths Throughout Life

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From the course by University of Pennsylvania

Positive Psychology: Martin E. P. Seligman’s Visionary Science

2118 ratings

University of Pennsylvania

Positive Psychology: Martin E. P. Seligman’s Visionary Science

2118 ratings

Course 1 of 5 in the Specialization Foundations of Positive Psychology

Dr. Martin E.P. Seligman—renowned worldwide as the “father of Positive Psychology”—has led visionary leaps in the scientific research, empirical data and personal understandings of human flourishing. This course explores the past, present and future of positive psychology as a journey through the key scientific leaps led by Dr. Seligman and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania's Positive Psychology Center and Master of Applied Positive Psychology program. There are no prerequisites.

From the lesson

Being Whole: Mind/Body Flourishing Throughout Life

In this module, Dr. Martin Seligman shares key research questions from the field of Positive Psychology, and the answers turn some conventional assumptions on their head. Are we shaped by the future vs. the past? And what does science tell us about mind/body flourishing? What gets better as we age?

Positive Aging: Creativity and Strengths Throughout Life4:41

Creativity and Imagination10:20

Creativity and Imagination Part 28:18

Meet the Instructors

Martin E.P. Seligman, Ph.D.
Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology & Director, Positive Psychology Center
Positive Psychology Center

[MUSIC]

The work on dementia has essentially been

at a stand still, almost my entire life.

We know correlates of it, we know causes of it, but

we don't know what to do about it.

Now, one thing that I think may make inroads into dementia,

in dementia, we concentrate on what people can't do.

But I think what we've talked about in positive psychology tells us that what

people can do can override what people can't do.

So in approach to dementia, in which instead of the asking people

how bad is your memory, asking them, what are you good at?

And how can you do more of that to fill your life?

Now, I've noticed over the last decade that there's stuff that I'm worse at.

So, I can't remember a lot of things,

I'm not demented yet, but I can see my memory going.

Physically, I'm not as fast as I used to be, but

I've wondered about the question of creativity in aging.

And so, we know in aging that conduction speed goes down,

energy goes down, memory goes down, and originality goes down.

And yet if you ask me, as I've asked many of my colleagues my age,

Tim Beck being a good example at age 95,

I asked him recently, when Tim were you at your most creative?

And he said right now.

>> Nice.

>> So is it possible, that I could be at my most creative, or

Tim Beck could be at his most creative, at age 95?

And the answer is yes.

And that's because you get better at certain other things as you age.

So I may be slower, my memory may be bad, my originality may not be good,

my stamina may not be lower, but I know more than I used to.

That is, my knowledge base is greater.

Secondly, when you think about creativity, it's not just having an original thought,

it's knowing the audience, whether or not it's going to fly.

Whether or not it's going to flop.

Now after 50 years of working in psychology,

I have a very good sense of audience.

And I'm able to advise people about what's a swamp and

is never going to take, and what may work out.

If you think of creativity as being the combination of originality, and sense

of the audience, originality goes down, but sense of the audience gets better.

So it's possible that as we age we may get more creative.

I want to summarize this area, an area I call positive gerontology,

with the following story, which may be urban legend about Itzhak Perlman.

So Perlman, as you may remember, had polio as a child.

So when he goes on to stage, sort of painful to watch him go on to stage.

And it's said that he was playing the Beethoven violin concerto and

when he started, one of the strings broke.

And apparently, when a string breaks for a solo violinist,

what they usually do is they commandeer the violin of the first violinist, or

they go offstage and get another Stradivarius.

He did neither, apparently, he played the Beethoven on three strings,

which I'm told by my musical friends is almost impossible.

But apparently, it was a great performance and

at the end of it people applauded vigorously.

And Perlman stopped them and said,

sometime the job of the artist is to see how

much music we can make with what we have left.

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