Did People Used To Look Older?

Hey, Vsauce! Michael here. At the age of 18, Carl Sagan looked like a teenager. But it doesn't take long in an old high school yearbook to find teenagers who look surprisingly old. These people are all in their 20s, but so are these people. This is Elizabeth Taylor when she was just 17, and here are some high school students from the 70s. Did people used to look older? Brandon McCarthy asked on Twitter, and evidence poured in. People shared photos of their parents in their early twenties: their dad at 21, their mom at 18 or 19, their dad at 45. One user shared their husband at 27 and what his father looked like at 23.

And there's pretty much an entire subculture around how old footballers looked decades ago: 24, 31, 33, 29, 27. It's not uncommon to think that there's something more grown-up about the way people used to be. To look back and think that people seemed older at a younger age than they do now, let's call it "retrospective aging." It doesn't happen to everyone; people do not and never have aged similarly, and there's even the opposite observation that kids these days grow up too fast. But it's a popular question and subject of numerous memes.

So, is it real or is it an illusion fueled by cherry-picked examples that feeds rosy nostalgia for a time when people were tough and didn't have it as easy as you kids have it now? Well, as it turns out, both! Humans today really are aging more slowly than their historic counterparts. Changes in lifestyle, nutrition, smoking habits, healthcare, early life conditions, and skincare—particularly the use of sunscreen—are a huge part of it.

By comparing measures of metabolic, cardiovascular, inflammatory, kidney, liver, and lung function across time, researchers at Yale and USC have found that we are in fact staying younger for longer than we used to. So, does that mean that 60 is the new 50? Almost. Their results suggest that between the early 90s and the late 2000s, 60 became the new 56, 40 became the new 37 and a half, and 20 became the new 19.

Oh, also during the last century, dentistry and orthodontics have played a huge cosmetic role in the kinds of faces we see in parts of the world. But interestingly, when faces in magazines are measured from the 1930s to today, the only significant change has been that across all ethnicities, the media is now exposing us to larger lips. Also, retroactive aging can occur over short time spans.

When I was a freshman, the seniors in my high school seemed so old to me. By the time I was a senior myself, I looked in the mirror and at my peers and I was like, "We are them now," but we don't seem as old as they did. What's going on? It isn't just about bodies. First of all, the seniors I looked at when I was a freshman truly were older than me at that time. They graduated and went away, and later when I was a senior, I saw myself as I was, but in my mind's eye, I saw the earlier seniors as they appeared to me when I was younger.

Retrospective aging seems to also be about perspective. Let's go back to this tweet. This is George Wendt playing Norm on the TV show Cheers. Now, when Cheers premiered, Wendt was indeed 34, but I looked it up, and this image is actually from episode 24 of season 5 when Wendt was 38. So we're not comparing apples to apples here. However, this is an image of George Wendt at 34, and Ashley Fairbanks made some alterations and a good point.

However, here's the rub: these alterations don't make Wendt look more like a 34-year-old; they make him look more like a 34-year-old today. Similarly, giving the Golden Girls modern-day hairstyles and makeup drops their apparent age a lot. Superficial styles and mannerisms can often make not just a big difference, but all the difference, which supports the hypothesis that retrospective aging is often an illusion.

Modes of self-expression are always changing: clothing, hairstyles, accessories, makeup, mannerisms, language, body language. Now, modes can come back but never exactly; the context is always a little bit different. From what's available or acceptable at any one time, we each draw ways of appearing or being in the world. Even if you don't care about how you look or think about how you act, what options you even have are dictated by what's currently popular or normal or being pushed on people like you.

Few of us stay at the stream drawing what's new all our lives. For various reasons, we often wander away with our catch. Perhaps it's because we settle into an identity we're comfortable with or fear the taboo of not dressing our age, or simply run out of time to care. But when we're gone, the stream keeps changing, and we get older and continue to use the mannerisms and styles we grabbed a while back. Eventually, to whatever those styles initially evoked, a new connotation is added: "old person." Not because the look or behavior is intrinsically for the elderly, but because those who use it—us—became old ourselves.

If you want to look older, what do you do? Well, you can dress the way older people dress. And the thing is, that's often how they used to dress too. We think people looked older in the past because they look the way old people do today. Dale Irby, a gym teacher at Prestonwood Elementary School in Dallas, Texas, posed for his first yearbook photo in 1973. The following year he accidentally wore the same outfit again. He says he was embarrassed at first, but his wife Kathy challenged him to do it again.

So he did, and he never stopped. What he gave us is a great exaggerated example of how what once connoted youth comes to be associated with old age. The people we keep seeing a style on get older and older themselves until we think of the style itself as being for old people. Retrospective aging then is double-pronged: both real and illusory. People in the past really did age faster than us because of differences in nutrition, lifestyle, and medicine. But much, if not most, can be chalked up to the fact that we think people like this are dressed like old people, but that's an anachronism. They're dressed like old people from the future—the old people they would become.

Has anyone ever dressed like a young person from the future? Well, it happened in 1941 at the reopening of the South Fork Bridge in Canada. A crowd came out to celebrate, and photos were taken. In 2010, the photos were digitized and placed online. That's when this guy was noticed: a time-traveling hipster! Why a time traveler wouldn't bother to blend in, and why, with all of history to visit, he chose the reopening of a bridge in the ‘40s, no one knew. The photo was confirmed to be undoctored, and researchers put forward the idea that this man was not in fact a time traveler—that his shirt wasn't an ironic screen print but simply bore the logo of the Montreal Maroons, a nearby hockey team at the time.

They said his sunglasses and knit sweater were not unusual for the ‘40s, nor was his portable camera. The only thing that was unusual about him was how casual his attire was, and they're probably right. But this all raises the exciting possibility that someone out there right now—possibly even you—is unknowingly dressed like people in the future will, and your appearance in photos will someday freak them out.

You know, it might be fun to start dressing even more casually or in some other odd way on the off chance that you happen to nail it, and years from now, you are worshiped as a time traveler. Oh, that reminds me of today's sponsor! Hi, I'm Michael Stevens. Would you like to look like you're from the future? Well, every season, those who subscribe to Vsauce's Curiosity Box receive a box full of delicious brain food that we have made that very few people have yet.

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Wow! Whoa, who's that guy? Does he look like a Bill, a Mark, a Justin, or a Josh? Pause right now if you'd like to think about it. According to research from Millsaps College and Miami University, this is Mark—or at least, this is what we think people named Mark look like. By asking people to make and rate digitally created faces, researchers were able to put together prototypical faces for a number of different names. This is apparently what we think a Josh looks like, a Bill, a Justin, a Dan, a Brian, a Tom, and Andy.

The idea that names might conjure certain face shapes in our minds—Isn't that strange? For example, there's Wolfgang Kohler's famous finding that when asked which of these shapes is named "buba" and which is named "kiki," people of all different ages, cultures, and languages overwhelmingly assign "kiki" to the spiky one and "buba" to the blobby one. And sure enough, it certainly seems to work with names too. Which one of these men is Tim and which is Bob? Well, almost unanimously, people feel like this is Tim and this is Bob.

But are these men actually named Tim and Bob? Well, there's the rub. Just because we associate certain names—certain sounds—with certain shapes, doesn't mean we're right. There's no such thing as a biological name. If a person still goes by the same name they were given as a baby long before anyone knew what they would look like as an adult, well, surely there won't be a connection. But as it turns out, there is!

Believe it or not, in a multiple-choice setting, people can guess a stranger's name just by looking at their face more often than we would expect from luck alone. It's called the face-name matching effect. Here's a stimulus from Zwebner's research: this man is named Jacob, Dan, Joseph, or Nathaniel. By just randomly picking a name, people should get this right 25% of the time, but Zwebner found that people picked the correct answer—Dan—nearly 40% of the time.

What's going on? Can names actually cause us to grow to look a certain way? Well, apparently they can. It has been called a "Dorian Gray effect." In Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray," a portrait of the protagonist ages and grotesquely reflects his evil deeds, while he himself remains young and pure-looking. In a similar way, it seems that in some cases, our own appearance can come to reflect the name we were given.

But I kind of think it's really more of a reverse-story Dorian Gray effect. I mean, in the book, Dorian's reality affects the appearance of his portrait, but the face-name matching effect goes the other way: an inanimate sign—a name—influences our actual physical appearance. Well, anyway, it's not news that a person's name can lead others to have certain expectations of them and treat them accordingly.

It's been found, for example, that multiracial faces given European names are rated as looking more European than the same faces are when presented with non-European names. The expectations a name carries with it may create a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby, as a person grows up, they're motivated to fulfill those expectations, carry themselves in ways people think someone with their name should, and even like, dislike, accentuate, hide, use, and avoid different parts of their face and body depending on whether or not those parts match their name.

It's been found that faces and names that match are emotionally liked more than faces and names that don't. Analysis of voting data has shown that senatorial candidates earn 10% more votes when their names fit their faces very well than when they fit very poorly. Now, with that in mind, part of the effect could literally come from the fact that although parents don't know what their kid will look like as an adult, the parents do know what they look like and, without knowing it, tend to prefer names that match their faces, which are likely to resemble their child's face as well.

But not always. If the dissonance is too great, a person can always change their name—either completely or by simply choosing a nickname. If I had been just a little bit different, I, Michael, could have always gone by Mike. The fact that people can adjust their names to fit them, of course, merely strengthens the face-name matching effect.

By studying whether the correct name could be guessed when different parts of a face were occluded, researchers were able to develop heat maps showing which parts of the face different names are most characteristically associated with. Apparently, looking like an "Ann" is all about the tip of the nose. It's the bridge of the nose for "Arthurs," and the philtrum or "snot trough" for "Benjamins." Aurélis are recognized by their "face spiders."

Let's go back to old people. How old is an old person? 73.7. That's according to results published in the Journal of American Geriatrics last year. It's the average age people gave when asked when does old age begin. People under 65 on average said 71, and people over 65 on average said 77. Women said old age began three years later than men did. White people said it began eight years later than non-whites did, and people who felt healthy placed old age later in life than those who felt less healthy.

But how old do people want to be? Well, that depends on how old they already are. In America, the only people who are the age they would like to be are 21-year-olds. Well, younger than 21 wish they were older, and people older than 21 wish they were younger. People who are 40 wish they were 30, people who are 60 wish they were 40, and people who are 90 wish they were 60.

When people are asked if they could be one age forever, the average American picks 36, which is actually how old I am right now! Funny enough, here's something else that's funny. Old people are more likely to think they dream in black and white, not because it's part of the aging process, but because they are veterans of the great black-and-white dream epidemic of the 20th century.

Prior to the 1900s, Aristotle, Descartes, Freud—everyone who wrote about the topic reported that dreams contained color. But as humanity moved into the 20th century, the number of people reporting color in their dreams dropped just as quickly as the popularity of new black-and-white movies and TV shows. By the ‘60s, as color TV and movies became more and more common, reports of colored dreams started going back up.

And today, people who grew up with black-and-white TV continue to report more black-and-white dreams than those who didn't. And later studies across China found the same thing: the frequency of black-and-white dreaming correlated strongly with how common black-and-white TV was in a person's area. So did black-and-white movies and TV literally change our dreams?

Well, first of all, it's not clear whether dreams themselves actually changed or if people just started thinking differently about their dreams. We're trying, but we still haven't found a way to get direct access to dream content. Eric Schwitzgebel has pointed out that, as far as we know, dreams may not be in color or black and white or sepia or anything. They may be primarily indeterminate in color as they happen, and only later during recall do we confabulate details about color.

He compares dreaming to reading: Is a novel in color or black and white? As you read a story, what do you see in your mind? It might be the case that dreams, vaporous as they are, are something we simply have a terrible grip on and that movies and TV shows have given us the illusion of understanding them. In fact, Schwitzgebel has speculated that smells and touch sensations are rare in dreams today, but future people with smelly, touchy-feely VR shows might think that they dream with lots of textures and odors and find it strange—maybe even frightening—that few of us seem to.

But why would we think that dreams were like moving pictures and not normal waking life? Well, no one knows. It might be that motion pictures are just simply the closest thing we have to dreaming that isn't dreamy. Unlike still images—paintings, photographs, tapestries—motion pictures and dreams can contain movement and narrative and cause and effect. And unlike stage plays or real life, motion pictures and dreams are not made of anything that is even remotely similar to what they depict. They're both made of phantoms.

Images are uncanny things. A person in an image is frozen in time but yet can seem to grow old. Our own image can depend on what we are called. And they're the closest thing we have to what our mind does when we're away. Do you get the picture, or does the picture get you? And as always, thanks for watching! [Music] [Music]