Watching ‘Meet the Humans’ is a bit like studying behaviour patterns around a waterhole in a game park, writes
even being aware they are doing this.”
Some findings supported existing research — for example, after priming the brain with positive words like “vibrant” and “active”, nearly all the volunteers walked faster.
This test was done in the first episode, set up like a school reunion, which focused on the “ageing animal”. After donning school uniforms, some of the women were swinging their arms like kids and bouncing around.
Mosley says: “The participants on that weekend last saw each other when they were 16 years old and now they are 49 or 50. We wanted to see if we can turn back time and get them to relive their experiences, even including the school bully, and we planted false memories.”
The producers did this by including a man who had never attended their school and trying to convince the group, with the aid of a falsified year book, that he had been at the school but they had simply forgotten him.
In that episode (which aired this week) Mosley also tested whether putting people back into a schoolroom context — they wore uniforms, took part in a physical education class and quiz, there was even a disco — would make them act more youthfully.
Physical prompts like the feel of uniforms, the smell of school dinners and other cues were used to evoke their student memories and that feeling of being young.
By the end of the weekend everyone but the imposter had lower blood pressure and a few of them had more spring in their step. Mosley was surprised by how much most of the participants in each episode enjoyed their experiences, even after finding out that they had been unwitting guinea pigs.
“It was important they did not know the purpose [of each episode] so we used subterfuge. But people genuinely loved taking part.”
In the school reunion, for example, the woman who started off awkwardly as a self-declared introvert left feeling more positive — in contrast to the school bully, who left seeming more reflective.
Meet the Humans is contrived, of course, but it has a winning combination of drama and comedy, supported by the science of the human animal and our ability to connect to the subjects.
As the surveillance cameras zoom onto some unsuspecting person, you can imagine how you would feel. Or what you would do. LS