I'm convinced aging is a demon without any teeth, or very few left, bad legs and a fading mind. One has to keep watching it or it will get you! As they say in Jamaica, "Watch yo' backside mon!"
I used to know Agnes Semler, an elderly now long gone Inuvialuit lady who was instrumental in getting the northern land claims movement started. She had a framed saying (Wandspruch in German) on the dining room wall of her home in Inuvik: "Ve get too soon oldt und too late schmart!" I first met her at, of all places, a conference at Harvard University, where she turned the place blue with her "Goddam this!" or "Shit on dat"! What a great way to be an old lady! Ed ----- Original Message ----- From: Arthur Cordell To: 'Keith Hudson' ; 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION' Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2011 8:43 AM Subject: Re: [Futurework] Avoiding Alzheimer's Thanks for your candid and honest posting. I too have the same issues. And it is not by accident that the saying "having a senior's moment" was invented. As all parts of the body wind down so too it appears does the brain. Connections become more sporadic, less predictable. Keeping mentally active seems good for the brain. Keeping physically active seems good for muscles and cardio, etc. We do what we can. No guarantees. We are presiding over what we hope is the graceful degradation of our bodies. Arthur From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2011 4:11 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: [Futurework] Avoiding Alzheimer's At 17:51 04/01/2011 -0800, Mike Gurstein wrote: Lots and lots of interesting/valuable stuff in this article. M Referring once again to the suberb article that Mike posted (below) I've changed the thread because this might provoke a separate discussion. What interested me is towards the end where Alan Deutschman is writing about what neuroscience has to say about keeping one's brain active in old age -- to avoid the 50:50 chance of going senile by the age of 85. He then writes: <<<< "Everyone needs a new project instead of always being in a bin," Merzenich says >>>> The evidence suggests that highly intelligent people tend to avoid Alzheimer's. More correctly, according to one school of neuroscience, everybody develops the same sort of blockages, but that highly intelligent people, with a denser neuronal network are able to tap into more side-routes around them. Why I'm particularly interested in this is that, at 75 years old, I'm often finding difficulty in recalling words. These are words which another part of my brain tells me I know -- somewhere in my brain! Usually I just let go, and then the word comes to me a few minutes or an hour or two later. But sometimes, usually with names I ought to be familiar with, I sometimes have to go onto the Internet to track it down. I couldn't think of "Clinton" the other day! One of my scientific heroes is Freeman Dyson and yet, when I try to recall it, the name "Wayland" comes into my head and won't go away. I then have to trawl through my bookshelves. (The only Wayland I know is Wayland Young, a politician who died in 2009. I once used to know him but he wasn't a scientist and he had no relationship with Freeman Dyson. In my case, therefore, my rotting brain is not only developing blockages, but developing spurious new connections!) I'm not too worried about developing Alzheimer's. My loss of recall has been developing slowly for about 10-15 years so there's unlikely to be any rapid onset (I hope!). But I wonder sometimes whether I'd be in the wrong camp when 85. I take heart, however, that Harry and Ed on this list, having already reached this august age, are as lucid as ever in their postings. Or perhaps I've become more impresssionable and they're not so clever after all! My new anti-Alzheimer's project? I've recently taken to doing the Daily Telegraph cryptic crossword again. This is of about medium difficulty and not so pretentious as some in intellectual magazines. However, it's taking me most of the day (albeit at odd moments), and I don't always finish it even then. When I last used to do this crossword 50 years ago I usually finished it comfortably within an hour or so. Keith snip, snip, snip ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
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