They Both Went Bananas," but as the song was to begin, "Bananas", one of the two performers would get to the mike first and, after repeating their own version of the song, both would sing it together. In 1965 (the year "Bananas" hit the charts), I was a college student from Ohio working as a summer-camp counselor. A couple of my friends were working in the camp office, and we spent a lot of time down at the lake in a small rowboat we kept in a cove with a dock. The cove was deep enough that we could swim there easily, but far enough away from shore that a person jumping in was able to dive deep enough to let his lungs fill with air before coming up to see his friends running to the beach. Not only were there no rocks, but I was able to climb up on the bottom of the boat and hold my breath long enough to make this jump. I was surprised at how many years later I could still remember exactly what the underwater image was like. I felt exhilarated when I heard "Bananas" and my friends were surprised at how well I remembered the underwater image. In fact, I was so excited by this experience that I was inspired to start swimming under water. When I told my parents about this, they were concerned that my frequent diving into shallow water would damage my ears. I asked my doctor about this, and he told me to go ahead because (I presume) kids were made of rubber back then. I also asked him to make sure that they checked my ears every time I went to the dentist because that would be expensive, but he said it was important that I not spend time in the sun. I became pretty adept at submersion but had to stop (temporarily) after getting a bad sunburn. In about a month, though, I was diving again, but in a tank with much less sun than I was used to. I was fascinated by all the things I learned about marine life and went on to become a scientist. I also knew that the chances of me remembering the underwater image when my friends and I were 50 years old were going to be slim, so I wanted to know how much of my memory of that day was due to the original picture. I asked some colleagues who work on the aging process to see if there was a way to estimate how much the original memory had decayed from the original memory. The brain can function more effectively when it's not being deprived of oxygen, so researchers put people under a microscope to temporarily deprive them of oxygen for a few minutes and test the change in brain activity before, during and after this process. By doing this, they could determine if there was a difference in the amount of oxygen in one's brain when a person was experiencing a specific memory. They found that the brain is very active when we're experiencing a memory. For example, a picture of the Eiffel Tower is remembered best when we are most active. The more active, the more the area of the brain responsible for this picture is used. The same region of the brain is not used when a person is remembering a neutral memory or an event that occurred a long time ago. The brain uses different regions when different events occur. When I told my parents this information, they were surprised that my research was helping to find a way to make them young again. And I couldn't help but think that maybe it was due to one of those events, swimming under water. The researchers decided to do some experiments to determine if they could recreate the same process that would happen in my head when I'm diving under water. If they could do that, then there would be a good chance that they could make us young again. They began by giving people pictures of an underwater environment, then tested if those people could accurately recall and describe the same environment when in the "dive" tank (where there's no water, just air). The researchers reasoned that if a person's thoughts could be focused on underwater memory (and not on other memories), then it should work if the person was only immersed in air. When the researchers repeated the testing in the water, they were astounded to discover that the people who had been focused on the underwater pictures were experiencing the memory while they were being immersed in water. So, here's my theory as to what happened when my parents brought me back to the lake and I jumped off the dock and into the water. They saw me dive down below the surface, but as I dove under the surface, I focused my thoughts on how cool the water was and tried to swim down deep under the surface. I wasn't sure what it would feel like to swim under the surface of the water but I could remember the coolness. It wasn't like there was no air down there or that I was having problems breathing. In fact, there was lots of air down there and I was having no problems breathing. I remember it being a bit hard, but otherwise, it was comfortable. It was the coolness that I wanted to focus on and this led me to believe that in order for me to remember the memory of underwater I had to focus my thoughts on the image of coolness. Once I became used to the coolness, I was able to maintain it by thinking about coolness and then I became comfortable enough to focus on how easy it was to stay under the surface. This helped to explain how I was able to remember being underwater and that helped me to understand the effects of submersion. This phenomenon of people returning to their birthdays helps me understand some of the mysteries of the mind. You can read the full story in a book entitled Diving into the Mind by Mimi Kaufman, ISBN 978-0-7603-4920-7. As I learned from a former student, if you want to live longer, work a job that you love. I have a friend who is a farmer and he loves it. He says that when he's working in his garden, he thinks about nothing else. He's never happier than when he's weeding his garden. He enjoys his work so much that he can think about that and not think about the fact that he is 76 years old. He has no idea how long he'll live and he lives his life just as though he will live forever. If he goes about the business of growing food for other people, he won't think about that either. Instead, he will focus on his life and not worry about the end of his life. What he is doing is what Dr. Gino Cappuccio is doing. He's the chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, which is where I met him. And, when you see him, you'll know that it's because he's a happy person. In fact, he's so happy that he's never in a bad mood. I asked him why and he told me that he believes in what Dr. Robert D. Abbott calls the happy gene. If you look at happy people, they look happy. If you look at unhappy people, they don't. In fact, when you look at unhappy people, they look unhappy. But, what they do all have in common is that they are so unhappy that they can't enjoy life. Dr. Abbott is a doctor and neuroscientist who has a different take on it. He's the co-author of the new book The Happiness Equation: An Easy Plan for Your Emotional Fitness (Penguin). Here are some of the things he said that apply to your quality of life: If you keep doing the same thing over and over again, you're going to keep getting the same result. It is not going to be good. You need to have something new in your life to keep it interesting. The two most fundamental factors that make you happy are how much you help others and how much you help yourself. Achievement means a lot more when it's difficult. There's no secret. You need to develop the inner resources to be happy.