General Discussion 217 



Parkes: In general, are assembly-line types oi" jobs unsuitable for old 

 people? Would it be too awkward to ask whether there is any evidence 

 that the inereasing expectation of life at birth is bringing an}- increased 

 expectation of potential working life? 



Bartlett: I don't think it would be possible to give an absolutely 

 categorical answer to that. The indications are that the increasing 

 expectation of life has already lengthened the potential working life, 

 when you mean by the potential working life the period during which an 

 individual may be of economic service in a community. I think this is 

 true, but it is an opinion rather than anything that can be definitely 

 proved. But it seems to me certain that the two things must go to- 

 gether, because the increasing expectation of life is simply an expression 

 of increasing fitness of human beings. At least I think that is true. I 

 don't believe — ^this is again a matter of opinion — that the increasing 

 expectation of life is very much tied up with the fact that the older 

 people are being better looked after, I think it is that they are 

 potentially much more active than they used to be. 



Parkes: The increasing expectation of life is presumably an expression 

 of the increasing control of diseases which killed children, or adults in 

 their prime, not of the control of senescence. 



Bartlett: The question of whether in fact, because people could go on 

 working for longer, with satisfaction to themselves and with economic 

 gain to the community, they will be expected to do that, is quite another 

 matter, of course. I think they will have to be. 



Schulze: I msh to mention a problem of the psychology of ageing, 

 which seems to be remarkable to me, that is the changing of the psychical 

 conception of the speed of time as a function of ageing. All of us will 

 remember that, when children, we considered a holiday lasting six weeks 

 an almost infinite space of time. As adults we. experience now an 

 apparent shortening of our idea of this period. In old age we shall feel 

 the same space of time to be a trifle. 



This fact may correspond to the change of our mental attitude to the 

 course of time in general. In childhood we are living merely in the 

 present and actual events seize upon our fancies. When we gTow adult, 

 the future achieves more and more predominance in our minds, whereas 

 the elderly are looking back and lose their power of recollection of 

 recent events. This quick-motion change of our spiritual idea of time 

 flow is a very interesting phenomenon, and I wonder if any experimental 

 work has been done in this field to realize the acceleration of our 

 "internal chronometer". 



Bartlett: I think that there are a lot of investigations about this, but 

 in so far as these have been experimental they are not terribly con- 

 vincing. It is very difficult to find any way by which you could get 

 experiments giving clearcut measurable results. 



Shock: This is rather an expression of the Weber-Fechner law, isn't 

 it? The boy's total lifespan is ten years, so that proportionately a week 

 represents a large part of it, whereas the fifty-five-year-old individual 

 has a lot of years to base his judgment on, and a week is only a smaU 

 portion of his total life experience. Accordingly, one would expect the 



