LONGEVITY, REGENERATION, AND OPTIMAL HEALTH Optimizing Learning and Quality of Life throughout the Lifespan A Global Framework for Research and Application

This overview surveys the new optimism about the aging mind/brain, focusing on the potential for self-regulation practices to advance research in stress-protection and op-timal health. It reviews recent findings and offers a research framework. The review links the age-related biology of stress and regeneration to the variability of mind/brain function found under a range of conditions from trauma to enrichment. The framework maps this variation along a biphasic continuum from atrophic dysfunction to peak per-formance. It adopts the concept of allostatic load as a measure of the wear-and-tear caused by stress, and environmental enrichment as a measure of the use-dependent en-hancement caused by positive reinforcement. It frames the dissociation, aversive affect and stereotyped reactions linkedwith stress as cognitive, affective andbehavioral forms of allostatic drag; and the association, positive affect, and creative responses in enrich-ment as forms of allostatic lift. It views the human mind/brain as a heterarchy of higher intelligence systems that shift betweena conservative, egocentricmodeheightening self-preservation andmemory and a generative, altruistic mode heightening self-correction and learning. Cultural practices like meditation and psychotherapy work by teaching the self-regulation of shifts from the conservative to the generative mode. This involves a systems shift from allostatic drag to allostatic lift, minimizing wear-and-tear and opti-mizing plasticity and learning. For cultural practices to speed research and application, a universal typology is needed. This framework includes a typology aligning current brain models of stress and learning with traditional Indo-Tibetanmodels of meditative stress-cessation and learning enrichment. Key words: longevity; learning; mindfulness; meditation; imagery; psychotherapy Background and Significanc