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My professional life began as a research student in the Department of Psychology in Cambridge UK, where I selflessly tested uncongenial rats for colleagues disabled by asthma, ruthlessly ran experiments on University Porters sheltering from the winter; bickered with an eminent academic supervisor and accidentally became a "cognitive gerontologist". My supervisor temporarily forgave me and, against his better judgement, gave me a job in his Medical Research Council Unit where I worked for 7 years. During 2 of these I was seconded to the National Institutes of Health in Washington DC. From 1968 to 1982 I was a University Lecturer and College Fellow in Oxford and then the most transient and inglorious Professor of Psychology there has ever been at Durham. In 1983 I was appointed to a Research Chair in the University of Manchester where, with many talented people, I studied how 6506 remarkable Novocastrians and Mancunians, at first aged from 48 to 92, changed over the next 20 years.
In 2004 I retired to Oxford where my eminent wife works. I have fixed the sign of my old Manchester lab, "Age and Cognitive Research Centre" to the door of a cosy room where I still continue to write journal articles, book chapters and such stuff (total 362 and counting) edit books (5), grumpily review colleagues' books and journal submissions, post a blog on Aging and the Mind (Outlookfromhutch.com), make a nuisance of myself to any colleagues who fail to avoid me, and to my hapless family, who can't, and have a generally wonderful time loafing, reading, writing, cooking adventurously but very badly, playing far too much weak internet chess and happily trundling around.
Like all of my contemporaries I am surprised to have become very old. After a lifetime researching how our brains and minds change as we age I, more than most, should have known that this would happen. A great compensation is that I am more interested and amused than I am distressed to discover how things that I and my colleagues learned in our laboratories now show up in my daily experience. In "Aging of the Mind: An Owner's Guide" I do my best to describe how our brains and bodies, and so also our minds, alter as we grow old and, most particularly, how ageing affects our everyday lives, consciousness and experiences of ourselves and of the world.
A fine, serious dignified academic firm, Routledge/Psychology Press, thought they were commissioning a text book that would be useful to undergraduates and graduate students, and also to medics, health professionals and social workers who are interested in, or involved with cognitive gerontology and the problems that people face during healthy old age. I hope that I have fulfilled my obligation to these worthy readers and to Routledge by covering all of the material that they need diligently and accurately. On the other hand I really did not want to write just one more textbook and I had to find ways to cheer myself up during a two-year stint of reading and writing. Hence the avoidance of Academic Style and many lame jokes, asides, and footnotes.
Also my main ambition has been to engage with, and to interest general readers as well as academic colleagues. I hope to pass on the latest news from the grey frontiers to non-academics, especially to my contemporaries and to the uneasy middle-aged; to explain as precisely and completely as I can what changes we are all experiencing or must soon expect; why and how these changes happen and how they affect our abilities and everyday experiences of life; to give evidence that most changes are far smaller than most of us fear and so are comfortably tolerable rather than hopelessly dire; how some of the effects of mental ageing on our lives can be as amusing as well as poignant and how we can best cope with what we cannot avoid. I find that researching and confronting the changes that age brings and their effects on my own everyday life has been a valuable experience, and not at all depressing. Indeed writing this book has enormously cheered me up. I shall become even happier if I can share some of this amusement and interest with others.
