Mary Fasano, at age 89, earned her undergraduate degree at Harvard.
David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, taught himself ancient Greek in old age to master the classics in the original.
At 90, architect Frank Llyod Wright designed the Guggenheim Museum.
At 78, Benjamin Franklin invented bifocal spectacles.
When Pablo Casals, the cellist, was 91 years old, he was approached by a student who asked, " Master, why do you continue to practise?" Casals replied, "Because I am making progress."
In studies of creativity, H.C. Lehman and Dean Keith Simonton found that while the ages 35 to 55 are the peak of creativity in most fields, people in their sixties and seventies, though they work at a slower speed, are as productive as they were in their 20s.
Learning new things play a role in being happy and healthy in old age, according to George Vaillant, a Harvard psychiatrist who heads up the largest, longest ongoing study of the human life cycle, the Harvard Study of Adult Development.
He studied 824 people from their late teens to old age from three groups: Harvard graduates, poor Bostonians and women with extremely high IQs.
He concluded that old age is not simply a process of decline and decay. Older people often develop new skills and are often wiser and more socially adept than they were as younger adults. These elderly people are actually less prone to depression than younger people and usually do not suffer from incapacitating illnesses until their final illness.
- Excerpts from The Brain That Changes Itself.
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