In 1979, a Harvard psychologist named Ellen Langer took eight men in their late 70s to a retreat house redecorated exactly like 1959 — old magazines, radio broadcasts, and furniture — and asked them to live as their younger selves for a week, and by the end their eyesight, hearing, memory, and grip strength had measurably improved
In September 1979, at an old converted Catholic monastery in the wooded countryside of Peterborough, New Hampshire — approximately 90 kilometres northwest of Boston, and approximately six months before Ellen Jane Langer would become, in the specific spring of 1981, the first fema…