We humans are extraordinary.
Hi.
We have these great big brains
but we also have animal instincts that drive us to behave
in sometimes unpredictable ways.
My god, argh, argh, rar!
I want to explore why we do what we do.
What makes us competitive?
Come on, Joe. That's 25 seconds.
Fearful?
And how much does sex lie behind our actions?
Where do you think my mouth is? It's there, innit?
I'm Dr Michael Mosley and this grand country house
is going to host a series of unique events.
Forwards. I give up.
I've invited some unwitting guests
to take part in carefully constructed experiments,
cunningly disguised as everyday activities.
Oh, my God!
They have no idea that actually
they're part of my human laboratory.
That was an emotional rollercoaster.
I mean just watching it was an emotional rollercoaster.
Yes.
I'm joined by experts.
Together we eavesdrop every conversation...
Oh, did I?
..analyse every move...
Everything I thought I would like to find,
it has been found.
His heart rate is very high.
..to reveal the real science
behind human behaviour before revealing all.
Hello.
Oh, my God! I love him! Sorry.
Blimey, humans are odd, aren't they?
Throughout our lives we have experiences
which we lay down as memories.
As we get older, those memories help to define us.
But to what extent do those memories also alter our behaviour now?
What influence do they have, not just on the mind, but the body as well?
I want to test an extraordinary claim,
that it is possible to slow down, maybe even reverse,
the ageing process
by immersing ourselves in memories of our younger selves.
I've got a bunch of people together to test this claim.
It's important they don't know what I'm doing
and what better cover for my experiment than a school reunion?
Hello. Hello.
Good morning. Welcome to the High School Equation.
My name's Erkan. Your name? Gerard.
Former pupils at St Bede's School in Surrey
are meeting up for what they think
is an organised trip down memory lane.
They're all approaching 50, a milestone in their lives.
It's a time of reflection
but also of declining physical and mental prowess.
Erkan. Your name is? Stephen. Lovely to meet you.
By the age of 50, most of the cells we were born with have been replaced.
The exception is our brains and the memories they contain.
It's those memories that make us who we are.
They give us our identity.
Good morning and welcome to the High School Equation.
Okay.
To hide what I'm really up to
I've created a bogus school reunion events company,
run by headmistress Marianne and her deputy head Erkan.
And I've also laid on some other surprises.
Good morning, young man. Good morning.
My name's Erkan. Your name? James.
James is my mole.
He never went to St Bede's,
but I want to see if we can persuade the others that he did.
He will play an important part in my experiment.
They think this event is being filmed as part of a reality show.
But the only reality is I'll be running things
from behind the scenes.
Morning. Nice to see you.
You well? Yeah. It's already kicking off.
Hello, hello. Good to see you.
Helping me out are evolutionary anthropologist Dr Anna Machin,
and neuroscientist Dr Jack Lewis.
Small scratch.
Each new arrival is fitted with a heart rate monitor
and, under the guise of a school medical,
has their blood, glucose and blood pressure checked.
I want to see if these change over the weekend.
We also looked at their psychological profile.
We asked them to fill in a personality questionnaire
and it contained things like extraversion, agreeableness.
It'll be interesting to see whether this actually reflects
what we feel about them when we've seen them.
Next to arrive is Tina. She scores as an introvert.
Studies show that your personality type
has a significant impact on your mortality.
It's optimists who are outgoing that tend to live longer.
To walk into a room of people that remember me
back when I was a size 8 to 10 will be quite daunting in itself.
How you doing? Your name? Tina.
Nice to meet you Tina.
She's had a very different life to the others. She had a baby at the age of 18.
She went through that major life transition at a very young age,
when the rest of them were probably off partying their life away.
Ah! Hello!
It's not at all nerve-wracking, is it?
Oh, I'm so glad you're here!
Paul is the one I'm looking forward to seeing coming in
I must admit, because he's the one who was, yeah, he was feared.
I was quite naughty.
I spent quite a bit of time in the corridor
looking through the window at the class that I should be in.
Some people may not have liked me
but I was just a little git, I think.
Andy. Paul.
Gerard!
James. James, how are you? Paul Green.
Did you go to our school? Yeah.
I have no fears of meeting someone from school that I have upset.
I remember having a few fights and taking the mickey out of people
but, hopefully they're not gonna come there with an axe.
I think I've got quite a distinctive name, Stephen Fortune.
So I think people remember that name.
Hi, Steve Fortune.
At school? Yeah, I was in your form class.
Was you? Yeah. Jesus.
Okay. It's all very awkward.
Lorraine has come all the way from Australia to be here.
She scores very high on what's known as agreeableness,
wanting to please others.
People with this personality trait tend to live the longest.
I'm here!
I know that I was popular and in with the in-crowd.
School was perfect.
It was really purely social for me.
Ah, look at you all!
Hello, love. How are you?
I'm fine, how're you doing?
Hello, Tina.
You all right? I am.
I just remember her being a really warm-hearted individual.
Hi, sweet. How are you?
How are you? Yeah, I'm really good, really good.
So our mole is in place and our guinea pigs are all here.
The experiment can begin.
Good morning. Morning.
I want to see if I can make this group
really relive their past, and if doing that can undo
some of the ravages of time.
Welcome to the High School Equation, your school weekend reunion,
the class of '83 St Bede's alumni.
I'm Marianne and you may call me Marianne.
This is Erkan, you've met him already,
and this weekend we will be your hosts.
I'm really curious to see the effects of this whole reminiscence
on their physical parameters.
This is quite a short period of time but it's also quite an intense time.
It's such an immersive situation.
What a bizarre environment to be in.
Right. Assembly is now over and class begins.
So if you'd like to follow Erkan through,
he'll take you for a trip down memory lane.
Quietly, please.
No need for chatting as you walk through the corridors.
The first challenge is to embed James in the group.
He's my mole, he never went to St Bede's.
So reminiscing about the good old days
should have no effect on his body.
He's my control.
But can we really persuade them that he was at their school?
So one of the things I'm really interested in
is whether we can implant false memories in this group, okay?
So what we've got is a stooge, you can see him here.
he didn't go to the school
but he's going to try and persuade the others that he did.
Studies on false memory syndrome have shown
just how easy it is to manipulate memory.
James, where do you live? I live in Swindon.
Swindon, okay.
James, I have to say my memory is that bad, I cannot remember. I don't remember James.
Well, sorry. It's not your hair. This doesn't help, does it.
James, James what? Reece.
What form class were you in? I reckon he's a plant.
We only remember of small fraction
of what happens to us in our everyday lives
so when we look back we fill in the gaps, we create false memories.
You might be surprised by that but we all do it.
I want to exploit this particular weakness in our memory
by trying to implant false memories in this entire group.
Does it bother you that people don't remember you?
Yep, cos I just...
Cos I don't, and I've got quite a good memory. Right.
James, get in on some reminiscence, please.
Time to send in Erkan,
with a bit of fake evidence to back up James's story.
We have produced for you, your own year book.
So if you'd like to pass them round...
There's nothing like a photograph to take them back.
I was gonna say this is really gonna take you back, isn't it?
Yes.
Horrendous.
Look at your hair!
Who's that in the corner?
Tell me they didn't go to my school like that, did they?
Yeah, it's him. Is that you?
They're really focusing on James now.
They are.
Because they should be able to remember the young version. Exactly.
I don't remember you. No, I'd have definitely abused ya.
Really? Yeah.
But in a nice way. I know what you mean, but I've changed a lot.
Yeah, you have.
Now that was quite a stressful moment here.
I can feel my own heart going boom boom, boom boom,
and thinking our whole thing is gonna be blown.
Creating a false memory of James has been tricky
but because our memories are so unreliable
I think we've got away with it, so far.
I'm really interested in the extent
to which the mind influences the body, and vice versa.
I've got some idea of their psychological profile
so it would be useful to see what physical state
they're in as well.
Time for a PE lesson.
Okay, lovely people. On your feet, on your feet.
PE! Out we go.
Sick note from Tina. Everyone else, out you come.
Let's go.
I had a sick note for PE.
I said right from Day One I wasn't comfortable doing that on screen
and so I bowed out gracefully.
Let's go. Knees up. Come on!
Oh, this is hysterical.
I still play football.
I send a message down to my legs from my brain
and my legs send one back - "Not a chance."
Silence please, Mr Green.
This simple test they're about to do has been shown to be
a powerful indicator of how well we're aging.
Silence, please!
Cross your right foot over your left foot.
The sitting-rising test is all about...
you put one leg over the other and you have to go
from a standing position down to a cross-legged sitting position
and then reverse the process,
stand up again from cross-legged to standing,
minimising the use of hands and knees and lower legs to help you.
Wait for the whistle.
They drop a point for thumping onto their bums.
Now they've got to stand up.
Very good, and now reversing, coming back up.
Okay, so James, very good.
They stumbled, minus point.
Lisa, very good. Lorraine's struggling.
No chance.
No! Don't help her.
Oh, on the knees. That's fine.
That's just minus 2 for each so she gets a score of 8.
Two hands so that's minus 2 points for using two hands.
Is that Gerard last?
He used his knee and the side of his foot so minus 1.5 points.
This obviously wasn't done under controlled conditions
but on the whole I'd say
more than half of them managed to get 9 to 10 in total
out of a maximum of 10.
From my point of view, I think this school reunion
is so far going pretty well.
Last night I was like "What the hell have I done?"
Like many social animals when we get together
we like to size each other up, make comparisons.
I've been a hermit for 20 years
and now I'm sitting here thinking "What did I do?"
I've been a Chinese brush painter now for 10 years.
Serious? Yeah.
Andy, where are you living these days?
Norwich. Ah, okay.
Gerard's doing some brilliant alpha-male body language there.
What took you up there, work or a lady, or?
My first wife decided she wanted to live up in Norfolk so...
Gerard looks like the alpha male in this group to me,
just in terms of the way he's turned out.
Look at his body language. He's sitting in that chair like it's a throne.
I've got a buddy up in Marsham, on the outskirts.
As alpha males go he's not bombastic, he's not overbearing.
He's all right. He doesn't have aggressive dominance.
He has a reasonably benign dominance going on
which actually is a true alpha.
Now being an alpha male in the animal kingdom
is generally pretty good because you have your choice of mate
and you rule the roost.
In the human world however, it's a bit more complicated than that.
Alpha males tend to have higher levels of testosterone,
and testosterone can be surprisingly toxic.
We know that women live on average five years longer than males
and that's probably because they have lower levels of testosterone.
That said, being an alpha is still a pretty good place to be.
In our society a lot of status comes from possessions,
clothes, appearance,
But what happens when we strip all that away?
I'm gonna get them back into their old school uniforms,
take away their status symbols
and see if that also ramps up the nostalgia.
Now girls, if you would kindly follow me.
Boys, if you remain with Erkan.
Girls, this way please.
Get your gym kit on.
You feel like you are almost 16 again.
Yeah.
There's some bouncing going on. I think one's reverting to...
Skipping, let's get the skipping ropes!
Do you remember that big skipping rope?
Do you see the arm swinging? That's a really childish thing to do.
Yeah, so they are reverting. Immediately regressing.
I love it. I do too, actually.
I think it looks great.
Lisa was the school heartthrob.
Like Lorraine, our personality tests class her as agreeable, an extrovert.
Extraverts get a huge chemical reward
from being in social situations, a lot of dopamine,
a lot of oxytocin, the endorphin hits are great.
The opposite is introverts who actually see a massive increase in cortisol.
So for them, this is a really different experience.
Stress. Yeah, completely.
For someone like Tina, this is probably a pretty tough experience.
It's striking that, like the girls,
now the boys are back in uniform the memories are flooding back.
I do remember we used to that thing where you used to...
Chicken bone it. Yeah. They do it with a rubber now.
Even the feeling of the texture of a school shirt...
People underestimate how certain sensory cues
are very very specific to certain periods of life
and that's what you need to transport you in time.
The touch of a school uniform, the sight of a badge, these mental cues
help our brains relocate memories.
In a flash, there we are reliving our past.
I always wore my blazer, always wore it.
Did ya? You had a briefcase.
D'you remember...
For Richard, school days were tough.
He had a serious speech impediment from a cleft palate.
A series of operations means he can now speak clearly.
You can't hide a facial deformity.
You've got to go through life facing the world
and I did struggle terribly with that.
You were a briefcase kid. Used to go "Get him! He's got a briefcase."
I was teased relentlessly, to the extent where there was,
in the second year, there was an assembly held while I was not there
by the headmistress to talk about me and my issues.
Do you remember Barry? Was he a briefcase brigade?
He was a bit of a special. You remember Barry, don't you?
I remember Richard, Richard um Coomber, that's you.
That's me. Hello.
Come the third year, the same thing happens again.
If you struggled at school, maybe you don't want that person
to be the memory that people have of you.
And you want to go back and present yourself as you are now.
When we look back we tend to put a gloss on events, it's natural.
But it's also a useful form of self-protection.
Yeah there was one kid in each year that was just not right.
We had quite a few in ours, though.
And here we are.
I think when Paul's reminiscing
about the naughty things he used to do
it makes Richard feel very uncomfortable.
Cos he was on the receiving end.
Paul's remembering it, it was a bit of a laugh.
But actually, to Richard, that's not a bit of a laugh
cos he was one of those kids with the briefcase who got kicked.
You never had a blazer, did you? No.
You always had a posh jumper or something, didn't he?
Yes. I remember you in my form cos you and Lawrence used to terrorise everyone.
They could be laughing with someone and the next minute they could be
a smack across the back of the head for no reason.
Stephen is now a successful businessman
but it seems Paul's school-day behaviour still rankles.
It's all coming back to him now, isn't it? It is.
I was cheeky but I was little, so I was quite lovable I suppose.
Do you ever have like flashbacks where you think
"God, I was a bit..." He went to confession though on that one.
I always went to confessions, and lied.
Listen, the girls are getting ready, we'll have a cigarette shall we?
If I had to go through school life again
I would definitely have changed my haircut that I had.
But other than that, no, not really.
It's what I did you know, at the time that's what I thought was right
and I did it.
Go on, all the way.
Do my eyes deceive me or has this skirt come up a little bit?
It has! That skirt has been rolled up!
Yeah that's more like it. That's the length.
I loved school cos it was my getaway place.
My mum has suffered obsessive compulsive
and a mental depression disorder.
Do you know what's funny? I will sort share now,
I was always very conscious of being different.
Maybe being in this experience is taking her back to that time
when that was a major concern for her.
I think it's proof that she's time travelled.
My home life was actually not very good,
but none of you girls would have known it.
Oh, my God, no! I lived this double life.
I remember never coming to your house.
I was this lovely friendly person at school cos I wanted,
I needed this... this need to be liked.
It's funny cos my memory of you,
you really were a lovely person,
whereas some people had nice looks but they were a bit nasty.
You weren't. You were just so lovely.
You were always the most popular.
Why do you think she feels this almost compulsive need to be liked?
People who've grown up in very traumatic households,
obviously it makes them emotionally quite raw
and one of the ways people deal with that is by putting on a mask.
One of those masks can be the people-pleaser mask.
You are so concerned that you are going to be rejected
and hurt in the real world that you deal with it
by being the person who makes everybody else happy.
Yeah, you do that well. Look at you!
Now that everyone's in uniform,
school-day memories are flooding back,
but how can we make them include false memories of our mole James?
Once we get one person acknowledging that "Yeah, he was quiet. "He didn't chat much.
"He wasn't at school for long but I do remember him,"
then the acceptance will spread.
Do you feel like you're in '83 somewhere,
seeing everybody like this?
You all recognise each other? No, I don't know who he is.
I do now. Do ya?
Yeah. Yes, you do Paul.
I remember the name, James Reece.
I wonder how James our stooge is feeling?
Poor guy.
He's very stressed. He's unbelievably stressed.
Tricky old time, a tough old gig isn't it, yeah.
We're asking a lot of him.
Shall we just sit down?
Right, the ladies sitting on the chairs at the front, please.
Can we have the boys behind, thank you.
They have only been here a few hours
but already we have seen some big changes in the group.
They are rapidly turning back into teenagers,
some more rapidly than others.
Were you pleased to see him? Not.
When he arrived, Gerard was the very picture
of a successful, grown-up businessman.
He's done very well in life.
I'm a partner in a small glazing firm.
That's a measure of success, I guess.
At school Gerard was not at all ambitious.
He did what he had to do to get by.
I just considered myself as, as middle of the road, one of the lads.
Not a bad footballer, not as good as Paul Green but not bad.
Shoulders back now. Oh yeah, sternum up.
Shoulders back, lovely boy.
He and Paul, if you look at the tie, are very much, you know...
Yeah, the big tie.
Naughty boys at the back.
I think Gerard's behaviour has changed.
He's now actually more like Paul, isn't he? Yes, yes!
Your formative years really do form you.
The experiences you have when you're younger have a longer-lasting effect
than you might want to admit.
Can you please smarten your ties.
Oh that's much better. Thank you.
Both Paul and Gerard are messing around
but they are also vying, in a rather teenage way, to be top dog.
Beautiful hair Lorraine still, haven't you.
Don't even look like a wig does it.
So what will happen if I introduce another alpha male?
Driving up in a posh car, popular boy Andy Carter.
Oh hello, it's not... Oh, my ride's here.
Oh, who's nicked my car?
Ah, it's Andy. Andy who?
What we're trying to trigger here is basically
"How am I doing in life compared to everyone else?
"Oh my God, this bloke has just rolled up
"in a big blue whatever it is, penis extension."
So there is social comparison theory
which is a rather grand way of expressing it.
It's Mr Bond.
Sorry I'm late.
Car trouble was it?
Had a car break down?
Come on, we've gotta hug him. Come here.
A money grabber.
Show off, show off, pick your nose and blow off.
Is there a bird coming in with a nice car soon?
Gerard is not looking happy. There's a lot of tongue movement.
We saw a lot of lip licking going on
which is a real sign of being uncomfortable.
Yeah I probably did think "God, he's done well for himself."
How are you?
Good to see ya. Yeah.
When you're middle aged and look back on your life
you often reflect on what it is you've achieved,
certainly compared to other people.
It's known as status envy.
Anyone who doesn't experience this is either unusual or lying.
That is some motor though isn't it? It is nice. It's a Nobel Maserati.
Like many primates, humans live within a social hierarchy.
We can't resist comparing ourselves with others.
It's normal to be a bit envious.
Studies have shown that it's the people who are happiest with their status
who are also the healthiest.
Right, let's do it.
This way.
Photo over, it's time to ramp up the experiment,
and memories of school days.
Who can forget the smell of delicious school dinners.
All these multisensory experiences of a school dinner
will report directly
to one of the most important parts of the brain for emotional memory.
Tuck in, Lorraine. They even have the scoop for potato.
Yeah, I know. Oh God, look! The pink custard.
We've got the frontal cortex here just behind the forehead,
the temporal lobes that run alongside,
and flashing deep inside there is the amygdala.
So this kind of emotional experience of a school dinner
is gonna set the emotional part of the brain, this amygdala off
and it's plugged in right next to the hippocampus,
hence smells triggering amazing memories from the past.
I do remember the rice pudding and semolina. Oh my God.
Oh God, yeah. And the pink jam in the middle.
Yeah, as if that's kind of gonna compensate for the horribleness.
Memories which are linked to emotion have greater impact on us.
As we recall them, the amygdala amplifies the emotional content
and we experience those feelings all over again,
for better or for worse.
When I was at school I was very shy, I was very quiet.
And I have found that I'm regressing
and becoming very quiet again.
You were quiet. You were quiet but I...
I wouldn't have said shy, though.
No, cos we knew you. We knew you really well.
Tina's heart rate is rising.
This is more than a casual lunchtime chat.
The nostalgia trip for her
is very different from the nostalgia trip the others are going on.
Tina's life took a very different path to that of her school friends
when she got pregnant and became a single mother.
I can't remember how we went, we kind of went our separate ways.
I can remember telling you I was pregnant. I remember, yes.
And you cried. She cried.
I told her in the toilets, and you cried and you went
"Tina, you have ruined your life."
Did I? Yeah.
I said "I haven't ruined my life." I said "I've ruined my career. I haven't ruined my life."
Oh Tina, I can't believe I said that to you. It's such an awful thing.
I know. And that's why I never spoke to you again.
Now she's said her piece Tina's heart rateis ret urning to normal.
It wasn't anything I felt I had to bring her to heel over,
nothing like that.
It was just a memory.
I think Tina is finding
having conversations about the past cathartic.
We know that bottling up negative feelings
can have long-term physical effects.
Holding a grudge can be bad for you.
It increases levels of the stress hormone cortisol
and it suppresses levels of a hormone called oxytocin,
a feel good hormone that also binds you to other people.
It can literally hold you down.
In one extraordinary experiment they found that people who had a grudge
could jump less high than those who are carefree.
The memory buttons I've been pushing are prompting
some interesting behavioural changes
and our attempts to create a false memory are also beginning to pay off.
I think I do recognise you now, just the look you gave me.
Is that good or bad?
The cogs were ticking, that was all.
Well done, James. James is doing a sterling job now.
The next activity I have in store for the St Bede's boys and girls
appears to be a general knowledge quiz...
but it's actually a test of the way we remember things.
What was the top-selling UK single in 2015?
2015, oh that's not fair.
Bruno Mars. Well done, Mr Green.
At St. Bede's, what subject did Mrs Rosser teach?
Eng... English.
Good man. He answered that so quickly.
Memories are not consistent throughout your life.
I suspect you can hardly remember anything that happened to you
between the ages of nought and five,
but the teenage years, they are full of events
and therefore full of memories.
This is known as the reminiscent bump.
As adults we have a tendency to remember more clearly
some of the things that happened to us as teenagers
than things that happened to us a few weeks ago.
What day was market day in Redhill?
Lorraine? Thursday.
Correct.
Clearly they struggle with some of the questions
which are more modern
but they're fantastic at the ones
which are relevant to them when they were kids
and I guess that's the reminiscence bump in action.
Now the lesson is over
Paul and my mole James are sneaking off for a crafty fag.
I feel like a fish out of water Paul, to be honest. Why?
Cos I was so kind of invisible. Kind of brings it all back, really.
What, bad times? Yeah, just being an outsider at school.
Our stooge is re-bonding with Paul over a fag.
Just reminisce over something.
Did you live in Redhill all your life and then when you was...
No, I was brought up in Dorking. Oh, right.
My old man was a bit of a tyrant so...
Yeah.
My dad worked away so I didn't really see him a lot, anyway.
Was he in the building trade? No, he's a avionics engineer.
My father was a good laugh when I was a child.
If my mother said "Wait till your dad gets home,"
I used to think "That is such a result."
Cos he'd just say "Oi, behave yourself."
Whereas my mother would live by the bamboo stick.
You can beat one devil out and six in, I find.
I think we're starting to get some insight
into where Paul's original troubles came from.
As Paul and James continue to bond, I've arranged a surprise...
Hi!
..four more St Bede-ers.
Stephen. Yes, I recognise you.
This fresh blood will present James with a fresh challenge.
Do we all think everyone looks the same?
I think so, yeah. Except for James.
I do recognise him but I'm trying to...
Do you though? Do you really? We thought he was a plant.
Not like a plant, but.
James has been finding it far harder to carry off his role
than we expected
so I've got a message through to him asking him to come to our hidey hole.
It was very hairy at the beginning but it seemed to get better.
It was really hairy if I'm honest, at the beginning.
We thought you were gonna be blown inside five minutes.
They really went for you.
Indeed. We were looking at your heart rate
and your heart rate went whoa, you know.
You've done really well just holding it together this far.
Don't think that it's blown at all.
Every memory that they're revisiting from school
is getting subtly rewritten.
With you in it.
I would probably return as swiftly as possible. Good luck.
Thank you. And get up, give 'em a big hug.
Thank you.
I do recognise him. Hooray!
I do recognise you. There you are.
Yeah, I do. Yeah.
Hi. Nice to see you.
How are you? Yeah, good. Thank you.
Fantastic! That's a relief. The first hug, that's good.
It's been touch and go, but James has really pulled it off.
But why are memories so fallible?
Our brains are not like a computer, there is limited storage.
So instead what the brain does, it takes a bit of information from here, a bit of information from there
and from there and assembles it together.
Sometimes it gets it pretty well right, sometimes not right at all.
Now that James has been fully accepted by the group...
Cheers!
I want to take them right back to the 1980s
and what better way to do that than dancing and booze?
Two to the left, turn,
clap,
clap.
Come on, peoples.
Will you turn it down a bit? I can't hear myself think.
Do you think you're a bit over the top?
No, I think it's risque, and I don't mean to offend anybody.
I know you don't.
I just found you at school really intimidating
and I don't wanna come across here like "Oh well, you know...
No, I don't want you to. I wouldn't...
I was intimidating cos I was not very confident
and I notice people piss themselves laughing
but I was very, not confident of myself.
And so you acted more, it was acted out.
It was a shield and it still is a shield now.
When I see people from school I think "Oh, fucking hell!
What? When I say my name I go "Oh God."
Cos I was cruel to people sometimes
but that's because I didn't want anyone to know...
I was intimidated, you intimidated me. Really?
And even though I went from junior school with you
I would not have wanted to be on the brunt of you.
I wouldn't do that to girls. I did actually once as well. I remember, outside my house.
He's full of remorse. He is, this is really interesting.
I remember saying to Gez, "Do you remember Paul Green?"
He goes "Oh yeah, he's just a really good footballer."
And that's his perception, "He's a really good footballer." That was it.
I said "I just remember him being a difficult person that I was a bit worried by."
I've said to him several times through the day
"Paul, I experienced you as quite bullying
and quite a difficult person.
I feel I held the mirror up to him and said
"Paul this is what you're like." And I think that's all I can do.
I've changed a lot. You learn, don't ya? And you don't know like...
Paul, you haven't changed that much.
I know I haven't changed but I am a lot wiser.
I don't think he really understands the impact he had on people.
I think when he knew I was coming here he probably actually thought
"Shit, I can't go because he's there."
Now I hope not, but I actually thought
"Shit, all them people there, what did I do to them at school?
"Why...
Am I gonna get tied to a tree and rotten vegetables thrown at me?
But then I thought "At the end of the day, it's 30 years ago.
"I weren't that bad."
But we've all had our own issues to deal with, we all had no confidence,
we were all fighting our own battles.
We've all had stuff going on that that we did cover up at the time.
What we are beginning to see is that our guests are accessing memories.
But these memories are different for each one of them.
In their memory they tend to be much better, more central, more heroic.
That's because memory is not like a DVD,
it's much more like a bit of improv theatre.
Every time you revisit it, you are the central character,
you are the hero.
It's all part of something called the "vain brain"
in which we project ourselves as being better than we are.
It's a form of self-protection.
The school reunion has shown how fallible our memories are
and how quickly we revert to type,
but I still haven't finished the main experiment,
taking them back in time and seeing what effect that has on their bodies.
We are in lesson time now.
We don't need to take up half the lesson getting into our chairs.
We have a very special visitor visiting our school today
and I'd like to you to give him a St Bede's welcome.
Oh!
Who is it? Who is it?
You may sit down now. I think I know who that is.
That's one of our teachers, isn't it?
Now, do you recognise our special visitor?
Yes. Mr Vaness. I said Mr Vaness.
Well done.
C'est moi, c'est moi. Well done!
What did Mr Vaness teach you at school?
Nothing.
Mr Vaness!
Sorry.
Put your hand up so I can see who it is.
French.
So we should say 'bonjour'.
ALL: Bonjour, monsieur.
'J'habite au bord de la mer.'
You live by the sea. Something by the sea.
Ah.
'La mer', see I know that cos I was on holiday.
77-year-old Mr Vaness is clearly on the ball,
teaching French may have helped.
Studies have shown that speaking several languages
can help prolong the life of the little grey cells.
In Angleterre, there we go. En Angleterre.
When I was at medical school I was told
that after the age of about 20 you start to lose brain cells
and you never grow new ones.
What we now know is that's not true.
You can actually go on increasing the number of brain cells you have
well into old age.
'Quel age avez-vous, monsieur?' Quel...
Our brains are plastic. They can be kept supple.
Stimulating experiences promote new neural networks.
Something challenging like learning a new language
or learning to dance
helps push back the onset of dementia by as much as 5 years.
'J'ai presque soixante-dix sept ans.'
I heard fish in there somewhere, 'poisson'.
77, quite well preserved. Wow, you look great!
In many ways we are as old as we think we are.
That's because we're strongly influenced
by things we're not even aware of.
To demonstrate just how powerful unconscious cues can be
I'm going to try and replicate
a famous experiment that was first done in 1996.
It involved something called priming.
The first thing we do
is secretly time them as they walk down the hallway.
Hi, Andy. Come and take a seat.
Hello again, Andy. Hi, Mr Vaness.
The idea of priming is that you use words or other things
to touch the unconscious and that this in turn
will reflect, the mind will affect the body.
So this is very much a reflection of the things we're trying to do at the weekend.
Can we make these people younger and more vibrant.
In this case, simply by the use of words.
If you look at the board there, you've got four rows of letters.
Are you able to rearrange the letters to make a word?
I can do that, I think.
Since it's crucial they don't know what's going on
the priming experiment takes the form of solving anagrams.
Think of yourself as being active, sporty, vibrant and flexible.
Active, sport, vibrant, flexible.
Lovely. Well done.
So if you just go back out into the hall and see Erkan
he'll tell you where to go now.
Thank you. Okay, thank you.
Let's see how he sprints out of the room.
Oh, that's quite rapid!
Shooting down. That was quite rapid.
He was moving some, wasn't he?
Tina, yeah, coming in reasonably briskly.
This is something I'm not.
Okay, well done.
She's going quite fast, actually.
We are seeing some perkiness here.
Priming seems to be having some effect on them.
They've got these nice, active, vibrant words
and they are actually going out faster than they go in.
Come on! Go, Richard, go!
If you go back out and see Erkan he'll tell you where to go now.
Boo.
Three out of the four went out faster than they came in.
So we've seen an effect.
We've seen what appears to be an effect, that actually being primed
with the young words they did actually seem to be moving
a little bit more spritely.
It may be a small effect
but it does suggest we can think ourselves younger.
At the beginning of the weekend
we did some medical tests on our group.
So has immersing them in the past made any difference?
Thank you. Here we go.
The blood pressure is very striking.
Their blood pressure has come down except funnily enough
with James, who's our mole,
and his blood pressure has actually gone up.
Yes.
He's a good control in the sense he's not part of this experience
and he obviously is quite stressed.
So I think this is actually very encouraging.
Not everyone, Stephen hasn't changed much
but some of them have seen
some really quite big improvements in their blood pressure
and that's consistent with previous studies.
This weekend has been about looking back, remembering the good old days,
re-establishing friendships,
but I want this group to also look forward
because they are now at a critical age
where what they do could influence the rest of their lives.
Right, we have used facial analysis software
and we have aged your photographs by 30 years.
Tina, would you like to come out and turn a picture?
Their faces have been scientifically aged using a computer system
which relies on facial aging patterns.
So initially I was a bit horrified until I saw everyone else's.
That's nice hair. Yeah.
Oh golly. Oh no.
Someone's had a fight.
Ah, it's horrendous. My old age photo was horrendous.
Yay, we got one right.
It's a shocker. I can actually myself in that.
That looks like Tina. Oh, that's so obvious. No, it doesn't.
It looks like your Aunt Mary. What is your guess? Tina.
I was right. Oh that's great.
I love that.
I loved that I was the only one that liked my old age photograph.
It was like "Yay, I've lost some weight!
Look at that, don't I look fantastic.
I wanna take it home and I shall be...
pride of place on my mantelpiece, it really will.
The old age photo was a bit of a shock.
Oh shit, that's me.
Everyone else recognised me but I didn't recognise myself at all.
Now we have one more very special guest to introduce to you.
Please welcome Dr Michael Mosely.
Hello. Hi.
Have you had a good time?
You were here obviously for a school reunion
but we were here to test if we could take you back in time
to an earlier time when you were younger and more vibrant,
whether we could see changes in both your body, your physiology
and also in your psychology.
And there were some really, really interesting changes.
For example, your blood pressure.
We saw quite dramatic improvements over the course of the weekend
with a single exception.
There was one person who did not improve,
in fact his figures got slightly worse
and the reason for that is because
he wasn't going back to the world of St Bede's
because he had never been in St Bede's.
We knew it, we knew it.
You can can grill him more later
but the good news was that things improved.
The bad news was that in some cases
your results were not fabulous and in the majority of you,
your blood pressure is too high.
I'm not gonna give you the results
and I've kept them entirely confidential
but if anyone wants to talk to me about it later, do.
The reason I make this point is because you are 50.
49, 50 this is the moment where you can actually change.
You all want to live healthy, you wanna live better.
Five years ago, I discovered I was type-2 diabetic
which was completely unexpected and my dad had it.
No male member of my family has lived beyond 74.
So I did something about it.
I lost 10 kilos. I've done more exercise.
I've made some life changes. My blood sugars went back to normal.
My blood pressure went back to normal. Everything went back to normal.
But I was given a warning, if you like.
I'd like to introduce Anna who has been observing as well.
What was fascinating for me was your behavioural changes.
You all walked into this building as adults
but what I was watching after a few hours was the class of '83.
I'm Jack. I'm a neuroscientist.
Brains are plastic, which means you can change them.
This myth that you can't teach a old dog new tricks,
it's complete rubbish.
Your brain, for the rest of your life,
will continue to adapt to whatever you ask of it.
The neuroplasticity means that anything that you do regularly,
intensively, keep it up over long periods of time,
it will physically reinforce
the networks in your brain that you're using,
and the ones that you're not using so much,
they won't get reinforced,
they won't go through the repair and maintenance.
Now, just projecting forward for a little bit
as we have done with these pictures,
what people are you gonna turn out to be in your 70s and 80s?
It's all about what you choose to do through the rest of middle age.
So unless you get a huge reset button push like this weekend
we'll just continue as adults
to carry on the same old habits over and over again.
So this is perhaps an opportunity for you guys
to make some changes starting today.
Thank you very much. You've all been brilliant, really, it's amazing.
What I've taken away from what Michael was saying is
this is now a critical period of your life.
So, a really good wake-up call for myself
and a few other people I think.
I am a little bit too much sometimes
and I think I've learnt a little bit to back off sometimes.
I loved this weekend.
I haven't been in a very good mental place for a few years.
I'm slowly starting to come out of that now.
This was a big step for me and I hoped it was gonna prompt me
to put old ghosts to rest and finally accept who I am.
I was always one step behind my peers
and I always felt inadequate.
And to be parachuted in to a situation
where I hadn't seen my peers for over 30 years
was quite daunting.
I'm actually for the first time
quite proud of me as an individual
and I've never been able to say that before.
Captions (c) SBS Australia 2017