Yeah, my 90-year-old grandmother is pretty much All Set at this point, but she was great at 76. Heck, she was pretty good at 86.

My grandfather would still drive out to our farm to help with chores when he was 93. (He died at 94.)

I am very close to my 93 year old grandmother, and will be very, very sad when she eventually leaves us, but she has been pretty miserable and scared and in general discomfort and pain on a daily basis probably for the last 5-6 years. She wonders why God won't take her.

Obviously this is a very personal and individual situation and I'm only talking from my experience.

FWIW my 90-year-old great aunt is sharp as a tack. She's becoming increasingly racist, but she has pretty great quality of life nonetheless. Of course, my grandparents are all long dead.

My mom's side of the family all are rather long-lived, and usually healthy up until they die. When her youngest brother Clarence passed away at 76, it was a real shock to the entire family, since the rest of the twelve siblings (except for the one sister who died at 13) all lived into their 80s or 90s.

smonster, the comments on that video on IO9 did include a lot of "I'll be in my bunk" (okay, she's incandescent--I'm straight and she makes me think that too), but your very thought was posted too.

I should have said "Most of the first dozen comments." I try to stay away from comments in most online fora. On a closer look, the io9 comments were pretty equally about the hotness, geek nitpicking, or actual video content.

76 is not old, or it shouldn't be, dagnabit.

The older I get, the younger it seems.

And now I'm thinking about my mom's siblings and doing the math to figure out how old they all are. Her oldest sister is turning 80 this summer! Mom will be 71 this year! Even the youngest is 67.

Now I'm a little freaked out. When did they get old? When did I get middle-aged?

On a closer look, the io9 comments were pretty equally about the hotness, geek nitpicking, or actual video content.

Unless it gets an influx (and the race topics seem to incite that), IO9 has pretty decent commenters.

People With Asperger's Less Likely to See Purpose Behind Events in Their Lives

BOSTON—Why do we often attribute events in our lives to a higher power or supernatural force? Some psychologists believe this kind of thinking, called teleological thinking, is a by-product of social cognition. As our ancestors evolved, we developed the ability to understand one anothers’ ideas and intentions. As a result of this “theory of mind,” some experts figure, we also tend to see intention or purpose—a conscious mind—behind random or naturally occurring events. A new study presented here in a poster at the 22nd annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science supports this idea, showing that people who may have an impaired theory of mind are less likely to think in a teleological way.

Bethany T. Heywood, a graduate student at Queens University Belfast, asked 27 people with Asperger’s Syndrome, a mild type of autism that involves impaired social cognition, about significant events in their lives. Working with experimental psychologist Jesse M. Bering (author of the "Bering in Mind" blog and a frequent contributor to Scientific American MIND), she asked them to speculate about why these important events happened—for instance, why they had gone through an illness or why they met a significant other. As compared with 34 neurotypical people, those with Asperger’s syndrome were significantly less likely to invoke a teleological response—for example, saying the event was meant to unfold in a particular way or explaining that God had a hand in it. They were more likely to invoke a natural cause (such as blaming an illness on a virus they thought they were exposed to) or to give a descriptive response, explaining the event again in a different way.

In a second experiment, Heywood and Bering compared 27 people with Asperger’s with 34 neurotypical people who are atheists. The atheists, as expected, often invoked anti-teleological responses such as “there is no reason why; things just happen.” The people with Asperger’s were significantly less likely to offer such anti-teleological explanations than the atheists, indicating they were not engaged in teleological thinking at all. (The atheists, in contrast, revealed themselves to be reasoning teleologically, but then they rejected those thoughts.)

These results support the idea that seeing purpose behind life events is a result of our mind’s focus on social thinking. People whose social cognition is impaired—those with Asperger’s, in this case—are less likely to see the events in their lives as having happened for a reason....

Huh. Now I'm wondering how often I have "anti-teleological responses" and if I do this less often than a non-aspie atheist... I'd guess that I don't think that way that often.

My 88 year mother takes classes five days a week at the local Senior center (including aerobics three days a week, and works out on a machine the days she does not take aerobics). She is in a Senior Rock N' Roll choir, polticically active in left wing causes and goes to pay-what-you can at the opera and local theaters and also has lots of friends. I would call her quality of life pretty damn good.