> In their new study, Yankner and his colleagues report that the brains of long-lived humans have unusually low levels of proteins involved in excitation, at least in comparison with the brains of people who died much younger. This finding suggests that the exceptionally old people probably had less neural firing. To investigate this association in more detail, Yankner’s team turned to C. elegans. They compared neural activity in the splendidly long-lived daf-2 mutants with that of normal worms and saw that firing levels in the daf-2 animals were indeed very different.

> “They were almost silent. They had very low neural activity compared to normal worms,” Yankner said, noting that neural activity usually increases with age in worms. “This was very interesting, and sort of parallels the gene expression pattern we saw in the extremely old humans.”

Does the low neural activity correlate with a less active experience of the world? Are you experiencing your state with the mute button on? I'm no neurosurgeon, but if this is the trade-off, perhaps living longer by using this REST gene might result in a less rich, dynamic, and textured experience? Might it mean living a life like this is less 'fun'?