dementia – Page 2 – Mistakes on the Journey to Nowhere

S3E2. No Shock; Just Awe

Last week I mentioned a video about the role of microglia in maintaining brain health and I said that I was in awe of the symbiotic relationship between microglia and neurons.

That got me thinking about what it means to be in awe of something. One morning this past week, I found myself dawdling in bed, conjuring up images of things that inspire awe in me.

The time I looked up at the sky on a crystal clear winter’s night and saw five planets came to mind. For the first time ever, I could visualize the fact that they were all in the same plane as they circled the sun.

As I stood there, I tried to think about the context in which this was happening. I tried to imagine my standing on the dark side of the earth, looking out at the planets, spinning around a star that is hurtling through a galaxy that is but one of billions in a universe that is ever expanding.

You want awe? That’s awe!

But then I took it in the other direction and imagined billion-year old light from faint stars reaching my eye, triggering an electric impulse down my optic nerve into my brain where it made a multitude of connections that triggered chemical reactions in countless synapses as electrons were traded among atoms that were composed of even tinier bits of matter and charges that floated in an indeterminate quantum soup whose forces control the universe.

Yup. That’s awe, too.

And then there’s the awe inspired by the the colors of fresh-cut flowers on the coffee table rejoicing in the morning sun.

I stand in awe of musicians whose hand-ear coordination moves their fingers at lightning speed to produce a sequence of a mind-boggling number of notes that seem to defy the standard laws of memory.

Forget about our modern world of digital wizardry, I’m still awed by the magic of radio. Think about it: we can emit an electromagnetic impulse from a single point that expands to occupy every cubic inch of space for miles around in a way that allows anyone anywhere within that range who has a few transistors to detect those oscillations and translate them back into the sounds from which they were made.

I’m in awe of Amazon.com.

Being at the racetrack and watching Secretariat win the 1973 Belmont Stakes by 31 lengths in world record time was the epitome of awe-in-motion. Watching the video still gives me goose bumps.

I’m in awe of the fact that last year, there were 19,603,733 people living normal lives in Chile. No, there’s nothing special about Chile in this context. I could have chosen Namibia (2,658,414) and experienced the same awe. It’s just that I don’t often take time to think about all the things that are going on at any moment, but when I do, it’s often awe-inspiring.

Closer to home, I am in awe of Sally’s resilience, compassion, energy, and uncanny ability to expose the questions lurking within every passing moment.

Finally rousing myself from exploring the wide world of awe, I sat down at the computer to check overnight emails, my Facebook and Twitter feeds, and the headlines from the New York Times. As I scrolled down, there were the usual articles about politics and Ukraine and COVID, but then there was this: “How A Bit Of Awe Can Improve Your Health.”

Talk about serendipity!

Or was it? Just a few days earlier, I had typed the first draft of last week’s episode and wrote that sentence about being in awe of microglia. Is it possible that one of the cookies The Times has placed in my computer monitors my typing and uses that information to select articles for my feed? If so, I am DEFINITELY in awe of that technology!

I’ll never know whether it was serendipity or cyber stalking, but in any event, the article was most interesting. First of all, it provided a definition of what awe is which validated my morning’s mental meanderings:

“Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world.”

Nice. Simple. Clear.

The article went on to explore the emerging research suggesting that a daily dose of awe can be healthy for you. Needless to say, non of these studies had yet been done when I was in graduate school from 1996-2001, and we spent no time discussing the emotion of awe in class. Awe was the furthest thing from anyone’s mind on the acute inpatient psych wards where I worked for 10 years where most patients were battling for survival and not self-actualization.

But awe does seem to have value in contributing to a sense of well-being, lowering stress and enhancing happiness. Although the proper ‘dosage’ of awe (both in frequency and intensity) hasn’t yet been determined, there is evidence that a couple of moments each week may be beneficial.

How do you get those moments? The key seems to be in mindfulness, or just taking time to think about what is happening, where you are, and what you are doing in a context greater than yourself. For example, you could put your internal dialog on pause while brushing your teeth tomorrow morning and ask yourself: “How did this water get here?” I’ll give you a hint: start with water evaporating from the earth’s surface and rising into the air to form a wisp of vapor in search of a cloud.

As you can see, it doesn’t take much…awe is all around us just waiting to be unleashed.

I wasn’t able to find any research directly linking dosing yourself with awe and brain health, but, clearly, it can’t hurt you, and it sure does feel good when it happens, so you might as well go for it!

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S3E1. Another Opening, Another Show

Welcome to Season 3! Where does the time go? And what on earth will this year bring?

For those of you who haven’t been following this blog from the beginning, here’s a little background. I began writing in December of 2020, at the age of 69, having discarded my latest career as a political activist and wondering what I would do with the rest of my life.

I must have been feeling a bit down, because the future I saw was one of either (1) a slow march towards my demise with the inevitable declines in physical and cognitive abilities that are part of normal aging or (2) developing a dementia—the greatest fear of pretty much everyone who makes it this far—and slowly disappearing into a living oblivion. My thought at the time was to document my decline—no matter which path it took—until I couldn’t write anymore. I thought there might be some value for others if I catalogued my mental slip-ups and tried to figure out whether they were normal or pathological, thus the title “Mistakes On The Journey To Nowhere,” with ‘Nowhere’ being either the vacuum of memory loss or death. Nothing hopeful or uplifting about that world view, eh?

Searching for content for my weekly essays soon led me to explore the research about aging and dementia, a topic I had pretty much ignored in graduate school when I was earning my Ph.D. in clinical psychology in the late ’90s. Much to my surprise (and relief!), I discovered that, although there is no medication that can effectively ward-off dementia, there are things you can do to minimize your risk of developing it. So my writing followed that thread, exploring and documenting the 5 pillars of brain health: diet, exercise, sleep, cognitive challenge and social engagement.

More recently, I’ve begun exploring what it is that actually goes wrong in the brain to cause it to break down as we age. Although I quickly get lost in the chemistry, I’m fascinated by the elegance of the various biological systems that have evolved to make this most complex and vital of organs work so effectively for as long as it does.

So if you haven’t been here from the beginning, now might be a good time to go back and check out the first two seasons. Here’s the link to the first episode: S1E1. Happy Box. At the end of each episode, you can scroll down to find the link to the next. It might make for some fun binge-reading on a long winter’s night.

So now I’m on the cusp of turning 72 and still writing a 750+ word essay every week. I suppose that’s fairly good evidence that whatever ‘senior moments’ I’m having are probably age-related and not indicative of anything more sinister. I can still think creatively, research, find words, spot errors and edit, avoid using the same words repeatedly, and put together a coherent narrative. So far, then, so good. And the simple act of doing so is good for my brain health as it presents a cognitive challenge for me each week.

Where will this blog go this year? I haven’t a clue! I’m not writing from some master plan or outline. Each week is an adventure and I don’t know what will tickle my fancy until I get there.

For example, this week I came across a fascinating video that explored the symbiotic relationship between glial cells and neurons. When we think of the brain, we normally only think of neurons, the sexy cells that link up with each other and communicate via electrical signaling to encode, store and retrieve our experiences. But it turns out that there are far more glial cells in the brain than neurons and that, among other things, they clean up the chemical detritus generated inside your skull as by-products of your immune system and daily wear-and-tear. Without these janitors, the gunk in your brain would accumulate until it snarled all your circuits and you succumbed to a dementia. Conversely, the glia are using all this neuron-related trash as food, so without neurons, they couldn’t exist. It’s a perfect symbiotic relationship…and watching the video left me in absolute awe that such a thing could develop over the millennia as we evolved from the first worms with a nervous system to the noble piece of work that is the human brain.

But then I started writing and, as you’ve read, I got sidetracked onto a brief review of the history of this blog and the story about glia was put on the back burner. Maybe, if I remember, I’ll get to it in episode 2. If not, here’s the link to the video: Meet Your Microglia.

I hope this has whetted your appetite for Season 3, even though neither you nor I know where this road trip will take us. In any event, I’m glad to have you riding shotgun!

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S2E52. The 2022 ‘Journey Awards’

The end of the year is traditionally a time to compile ’10 Best’ and ‘Best and Worst’ lists, so I thought I’d take a crack at it with some of the best and worst brain health events of the year for each of the 5 pillars of brain health. I thought about calling the list the ‘MOTYs’ for ‘Mistakes of the Year’ awards, but that didn’t seem to leave much room for celebrating the good news, so I went with the ‘Journeys’ instead.

Here they are:

1. Cognitive Challenge

There was plenty of competition in this category: playing computerized games on BrainHQ, traveling to foreign lands, reading books, writing this blog, and learning to play the recorder. As stimulating as they all were, I’m going with learning to play the recorder as the most rewarding cognitive challenge pursuit of 2022. It’s there for me nearly every day and it’s a rush to be able to play a piece or hit notes that I wasn’t able to master a month before. Learning to play meaningful melodies from across my lifespan never gets old. All in all, a pretty nice experience for a guy whose musical aptitude probably falls in the bottom twenty-five percent!

2. Exercise

One of my favorite lifetime brain health pursuits became an unexpected challenge. I was barreling along during the first three months of the year, working out 5-6 days/week, gaining strength, feeling great and losing weight. Then in April we went out to Minneapolis for the NCAA Women’s Basketball finals and I came down with COVID, which knocked me for a loop. It left me with a weakness that persisted for nearly 6 months. Working out was hard and definitely not enjoyable and I never got back into it consistently. My workouts now, when I do them, are shorter and slower. The weights I lift are lighter. So exercise definitely gets the ‘worst performance in a brain health pillar’ Journey Award for 2022.

3. Sleep

There really was only one contender for this award: my month-long experiment to change my circadian rhythm and sleep pattern in preparation for our Mediterranean cruise. It led to quite novel experiences, like going to bed at 6pm and waking up at 2am, but I think it worked. Upon arriving in Greece, I was tired pretty much when I was supposed to be tired and woke up within an hour of when I was supposed to wake up. The results, though, were somewhat confounded by the fact that I didn’t sleep at all on the plane and spent a couple of days recovering from that sleep deprivation. So now that I’ve figured out the circadian rhythm thing, I’ll have to work a little harder on the sleeping-on-the-plane thing next time we travel abroad.

4. Social Engagement

Thank goodness for Sally! She sets my social calendar and keeps me engaged. Without her efforts, I would definitely meet criteria for ‘hermit.’ But I don’t feel as though I’m meeting my obligations here. I enjoy being out with people and I enjoy listening to the conversations, but I’m finding myself talking less, so much so that Sally has commented on it several times. In fact, it’s gotten to the point that I’m not talking as much at home, either. I can’t quite put my finger on what it is. My mind is going all the time, I can hear just fine, I don’t have any word-finding difficulties and I have no problem following conversations. It’s just that I don’t often feel the need to say anything. Isn’t that weird? Becoming more subdued and withdrawn are often listed as warning signs of an impending dementia and fall under the category of ‘personality changes,’ so there’s that. Come to think of it, I get frustrated and irritated more easily than I did a year ago, so maybe this is something to keep an eye on.

5. Diet

This is a no-brainer: the 2022 Journey Award for best brain health dietary contribution goes to granola! (See S2E50: Granola Revisited). On the other hand, there have been several notable lapses in my regimen. I gave up overnight fasting, not for any empirical reason, but just because I lost the will power to do so once I reached my weight loss target. And now Sally and I are treating ourselves to an ice cream sandwich nearly every night. Again, no reason to do that except for the sheer delight of indulging in a guilty pleasure. This year’s Journey Award, though, for the biggest diet disappointment, was my attempt to drink a small glass of red wine with dinner each night. I conducted a noble months-long search for a palatable, organic pinot noir, but alas, to no avail. As good as it was, I just didn’t like it. And to make matters worse, even nursing a 4-ounce ‘dose’ left me a little tipsy. I reviewed the recommendations on drinking red wine and the bottom line was if you don’t already drink, then don’t start. In my case, it appeared that the neuro-toxic effect of the alcohol was greater than the augmentation of resveratrol effect. Since I eat red grapes every morning in my granola and I’m not a fan of supplements, I dropped red wine from the menu.

And that’s my brain health year-in-review best and worst list, the 2022 Journey Awards.

Thank you so much for reading the blog. I hope it’s been helpful, interesting and/or entertaining. If so, I’d appreciate it greatly if you’d recommend it to your friends and family at www.MistakesOnTheJourneyToNowhere.com. It might be a nice change for them from bingeing on Netflix.

Wishing you a happy and brain-healthy New Year!

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S2E51. Cholesterol? Bah! Humbug!

What kind of a Scrooge blogs about cholesterol on Christmas Eve eve when he should be decking the halls, harking the herald angels and making spirits bright?

Uh…that would be me!

I didn’t plan it this way, it’s just that I had my annual physical last week and my cholesterol is high, so my primary care provider put me on a statin. Some holiday gift, eh?

I’m a bit befuddled by it all. In my late 50s, my cholesterol numbers were good, but of late, they’ve been hovering at the high end of the safe zone or a little above. I have no idea what changed.

About 2 years ago, I tried taking a statin and it worked. Shortly thereafter, though, I began my quest to lose 40 pounds and to eat a brain healthy diet, which includes foods to help control cholesterol. So I came off the medication and did the experiment to see if weight loss, exercise and diet could bring my numbers into line.

I’ve been eating all the right things for about 18 months now: almonds, olive oil, asparagus, beans, blueberries, tomatoes, avocados, cacao powder, eggplant, apples, and salmon. And then last year, I added oats, oat bran and oatmeal to my daily regimen. On the flip side, I don’t eat fatty meats, full-fat dairy products, or junk food, all of which can raise LDL.

I worked out religiously and lost 40 pounds.

I was pretty sure my behavior had earned me a spot on the lipid screen Santa’s “nice” list, but instead, I got coal in my stocking.

Since it didn’t work, I did a post-mortem.

Getting COVID last April definitely threw a wrench into the works. It left me weaker and unable to do the intensity of workouts I had been doing up until then. To make matters worse, I went off my diet during our cruise last month. I’ve gained back 12 pounds.

I decided to face reality and accept the fact that I probably needed the medication, but there were still a few things that were confusing me, and I wanted some answers.

In spite of the overall bad news, there were two bright spots in my blood work. First, it appeared that my efforts had paid some dividends in terms of raising my good HDL cholesterol level. I had succeeded in raising it to 60 mg/dL, which is very good. Consequently, my LDL/HDL ratio was also an excellent 2.4.

So I could make the case that the reason my total cholesterol had moved into the danger zone (219) was that my HDL had increased…which is a good thing.

So why did I need medication?

I asked my PCP about it when we met and she explained that the American Heart Association developed a formula for predicting the likelihood of heart and vascular disease emerging within the next 10 years. It takes into account factors such as age, gender, smoking history, blood pressure and total cholesterol levels. Their guideline is that your risk factor should be below 7.5%

She typed my numbers into her computer and swiveled her display around to show me the results. My risk factor was at 16.7%.

I felt like I had just been visited by the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come.

That sealed the deal. I’m now taking a statin.

What made the decision easier was that I had checked out the research on statins before going for my check-up. For several years, there had been concern that taking a statin could have a side effect of reversible cognitive problems. On the other hand, there were studies suggesting it could provide protection against age-related cognitive decline. So which was it?

A recent study appears to have resolved the conflict: the negative side effect is more likely to appear in those under 45 while the protective benefits seem to accrue to those over 65.

What a nice stocking stuffer!

So why does someone interested in brain health care so much about cholesterol anyway?

There are about 100,000 miles of blood vessels in your brain and their primary job is to provide oxygen and nourishment to each and every one of your 100 billion neurons and 1 trillion glial cells. So you want to do your very best to make certain that nothing impedes the ability of those arteries to deliver their precious cargo. Cholesterol is the grinch in this story that can gum up the works by sticking to arterial walls and restricting blood flow which, in turn, damages or kills cells.

So now you know what I know.

And on that note, I’ll close by wishing a Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

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S2E50. Granola Revisited

It’s astonishing what can happen to a bowl of granola over the course of a year!

In S1E47: A Granola Ritual, I described the results of my effort to make my own sugar-free granola. Here’s what it looked like then, oh so many breakfasts ago:

1 cup each of chopped walnuts, pecans and almonds

1 cup unsweetened coconut flakes

½ cup each of chia and flax seeds

1 tablespoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon each of turmeric, cumin and ginger

1 teaspoon vanilla

½ cup olive oil

1 dried fig, chopped

1 prune, chopped

¼ apple, chopped

15 red grapes, halved

6 raspberries or blackberries

A handful of blueberries

Enough flax milk to fill the bowl

I know rituals aren’t supposed to change, but the apostate in me just couldn’t resist. Every time I read the results of a new study linking a different food to brain health, I just had to figure out a way to get it into my diet…and my granola bowl every morning was the easiest place to do it.

The first thing that happened was that my annual physical showed my cholesterol getting a little high, so I immediately added 2 cups of oats and a cup of oat bran to the recipe. (I also started adding oat milk to my nightly kefir cocktail.) With the addition of oats, my morning mix now officially met the criteria for ‘granola.’

Next came cacao. Studies showed brain health benefits for cacao, but I couldn’t figure out how to ingest it without adding a lot of sugar. Then it occurred to me that I could mix it into my granola where the prune and fig might provide the desired level of sweetness.

So I bought some cacao powder and put a few tablespoons in the mix. It turned out that it added a little sweetness on its own, so I added some more. Now I’m up to 8 tablespoons of cacao powder, which is enough to give the flax milk a little color when I stir it all together, and just a hint of chocolate flavor without turning it into Count Chocula or Cocoa Puffs.

It wasn’t long before I realized that I wasn’t really tasting the spices in my recipe, so I increased the dosage to 1 tablespoon each of cinnamon, turmeric, cumin, and ginger, and I added a tablespoon of nutmeg to the mix. Having done so, there wasn’t any difference in taste that I could discern. A warning, however, is in order. One evening, for a snack, I tried eating just the mix with flax milk but without the fruits. It was god-awful! A ton of stevia made it palatable, but it isn’t anything I would ever do again.

So why add all these spices, you ask? Well, because each one has been linked to improved brain health. But you are only getting minute amounts in each bowlful, you say, so are you really getting any benefit from them? Good question! My hopes are buoyed by two pieces of data. First, there was a study out of India that showed eating curry twice or more each week was protective. And so I thought, “How much spice can that be?” Surely, my daily mini-dose (plus the additional mini-doses of these same spices that I get in my daily matcha green tea brew) must add up to a significant level.

Secondly, studies show that, in supplements, massive doses of these things must be taken to generate a measurable effect. But other studies suggest that eating a brain-healthy diet that includes them on a regular basis seems to offer just as much protection. So, yes, I think I am benefitting from this approach.

Now in an experimenting mode, I started adding things that I had read about but hadn’t included because they didn’t tickle my gustatory fancy. But the experience of adding things without fouling the taste gave me courage. So I added a cup each of sunflower seeds and hemp hearts. They added new textures, which were interesting, but left the flavor intact.

Turning to the fruit section, I quickly discovered that I could substitute a date for a fig and that it was even sweeter. After going through a few bags of dates, though, I think I prefer the figs.

It was several months into the new year before it dawned on me that I didn’t have any strawberries in the bowl. I couldn’t fathom how that had happened, so I bought a quart and pulled out the 7 largest, dicing one each day and adding it to my bowl. (The rest of the berries go into my kefir, as do 3 bananas, when I make 2 quarts every week.)

At this point, my bowl was overflowing and I had to switch to a larger one!

I always wanted to add raisins, but couldn’t find unsweetened organic ones at my supermarket. But then one day it happened: there they were on the shelf! The same held true for dried cranberries, so I added a cup of both to the recipe, mixing them in after it had finished baking and cooled.

But something strange happened. Even though I store my granola in an air-tight glass container, the raisins and cranberries turned into little rocks, barely chewable and sticking to my teeth when I crunched into them. With deep regret, I dropped them from the recipe. 😦

And then came Thanksgiving and the arrival of fresh organic cranberries to the produce section. I tried adding a handful of them, halved, and, boy oh boy, were they tart! But a recent study had them outperforming cacao and so I thought it was worth it to keep them in. Unfortunately, I’m guessing that they will disappear after the holiday season.

And now for the piece-de-resistance: vitamin gummies!

Sally has a prescription for medical marijuana to help her sleep and she takes it in gummy form. But as we prepared for our trip to Greece in October, we learned that it’s illegal to bring marijuana—in any form—into the country. I came up with the idea of smuggling it in by mixing hers into a bottle of vitamin gummies. By the time the bottle arrived, though, we decided it wasn’t worth the risk, which meant that I now had 170 vitamin gummies that I couldn’t use. Or could I?

I was never a fan of taking vitamins even though they pretty much can’t hurt and they often help. I tried the gummies and they tasted fine, with a hint of citrus, and the texture was interestingly rubbery. When I read the label, it said to take 2 every day with food…and that is when it hit me: I could quarter them and add them to my granola in the morning. So I did…and it’s a hoot! I play this game where I try to identify all 8 pieces when I bite into them. So now I’m taking a daily vitamin and have added a bit of whimsy to my morning ritual.

Reflecting back on my granola’s evolution over the course of this past year, it occurred to me that Forrest Gump had it all wrong: life isn’t like a box of chocolates…it’s like a bowl of granola!

For the adventurous among you, here’s the current recipe:

1 cup each of chopped walnuts, pecans and almonds

2 cups oats

1 cup oat bran

1 cup unsweetened coconut flakes

1 cup sunflower seeds

1 cup hemp hearts

½ cup each of chia and flax seeds

8 tablespoons of unsweetened cacao powder

1 tablespoon each of cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, turmeric, and cumin

1 teaspoon vanilla

¾ cup olive oil

1 dried fig, chopped

1 prune, chopped

¼ apple, chopped

1 large strawberry, chopped

15 red grapes, halved

A handful of raspberries or blackberries

A handful of blueberries

A handful of cranberries, halved

2 gummy vitamins, quartered

Enough flax milk to fill the bowl

Mix all the dry ingredients together in a large bowl, then drizzle in the olive oil and vanilla and toss until the nuts are coated and the seeds stick to them. Spread the mixture out on a cookie sheet (no need for parchment since there is no sugar to stick to the bottom) and bake for 25 minutes at 300 degrees. Voila…granola!

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S2E49. Indelible Memories

I’ve written about the fickle nature of memories in S2E4: Memory is Overrated and S2E46: What Will I Remember?, but today I’d like to address the flip side of that coin: indelible memories.

The recent heart-wrenching announcement that Roberta Flack has ALS and can no longer sing brought up a fond memory of my brief encounter with the superstar in 1977.

I was the manager of Newark Symphony Hall, a 3,285-seat historic landmark theater in downtown Newark, NJ. It was a Saturday and the show that night was two up-and-coming soul artists: Phyllis Hyman and Peabo Bryson.

There was a rumor going around that Mick Jagger and Roberta Flack might show up as they were both just across the river that night in New York City and were friends with Phyllis Hyman. It was just a rumor and I didn’t think much of it.

The show began a little after 8pm. It wasn’t a sell-out, but there was a nice crowd of around 1,800. It was about 20 minutes after the show had begun, the audience was seated, and I was talking with the doorman at the main entrance to the theatre.

Suddenly, a group of patrons presented themselves at the door, having come down from the balcony, probably trying to move to better seats in the orchestra section. It wasn’t all that unusual for people to do that and there were plenty of available seats, so it wouldn’t be a problem to accommodate them.

The doorman stopped them from entering and they were giving him a hard time, so I stepped in and tried to mediate. I told them that I’d let them in but they first had to show me their ticket stubs from their balcony seats.

Directly in front of me was a heavy-set African-American woman with her hair in dreadlocks wearing a floppy beach hat, enormous sunglasses and a white print muumuu. She kept shaking her head and saying, “I don’t believe this! I don’t believe this!”

I was in the middle of explaining it again when I heard the elevator from the balcony open and another group of people presented themselves. I looked up and saw Mick Jagger.

OMG! I immediately realized that I had been standing there arguing with Roberta Flack!

I apologized profusely and led them all into the theater. She was kind enough to tell me not to worry about it and that it was no problem.

Once they were inside, I rushed to find my partner, Roberta, whom I had hired to be our house photographer, to tell her to be on the lookout for them and to get some pictures. She found them all backstage and took the picture of Phyllis, Roberta and Mick at the top of this post. (Note: email subscribers can click here to see the picture.)

But that’s not where the story ends. During Peobo Bryson’s set, Roberta ran into Mick standing all by himself, leaning against a colonnade at the back of the orchestra section, watching the show.

With all the confidence in the world, she went right up to him and asked if she could take some pictures. He said he was really tired, but she begged him—I mean, literally begged him—for just 1 minute of his time…and he agreed!

For 1 minute, it was just the two of them: he posing and making faces; she snapping photos as fast as her index finger could go. It was the dream of a lifetime come true for Roberta, albeit a dream she had never even dared to dream.

After the concert was over, she was packing her camera bag and getting ready to leave when she discovered that she hadn’t had any film in the camera during her exclusive photo shoot with Mick Jagger. She was inconsolable for days!

Postscript:

Two years later, Roberta and I were married on that same stage. There were no famous performers in attendance that afternoon, but the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra was and they played Mendelssohn’s Wedding March for us.

It’s now 43 years after that event and Mick is still performing, but Roberta passed away in 2010, losing her 3-year battle with cancer. Yesterday would have been the 49th anniversary of our first date which we always celebrated as our ‘traditional’ anniversary.

As I said, some memories are indelible.

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S2E48. Decision-Making

Judgment, problem-solving and decision-making are closely related activities that require a higher level of processing than, say, memory or attention, because they require you to invoke a group of brain processes simultaneously.

To do these things successfully, you need to create and maintain a space in working memory where you pull-up and examine memories of similar situations and evaluate them for their relevance and importance to the question at hand. Frequently, you must do this under time pressure (which invokes processing speed) and in the face of strong emotions which obstruct the entire process by narrowing your ability to think things through.

Decision-making tasks activate both the hippocampus and the pre-frontal cortex, both of which are early targets of the dementing process. It’s no wonder, then, that we start making errors of judgment about the same time our memory starts to fail us.

A few weeks ago, Sally brought some breakfast pastries home from a nearby French bakery. Upon their arrival, I ate half the cheese danish.

Later that evening, I was craving something sweet and reached for the other half. I paused, though, because it is our custom to split delicacies like this and I had already eaten my half.

Cue the decision-making process:

I knew this particular pastry was really good and I was not all that interested in the chocolate croissants she had also brought home. A vague ‘memory’ popped into my head that Sally didn’t really like cheese danish and preferred chocolate croissants.

“That’s what I’ll do!” I thought, “I’ll eat the rest of the danish and not have any of the croissants to make up for it.”

That, of course, was a bad decision, especially since Sally was sitting right there and all I had to do was ask her if I could have the other half of the danish. Somehow, I forgot to pull up the memory that says you let people decide for themselves instead of deciding for them.

A week later, I was making Sally a grilled cheese sandwich in the toaster oven. It was lightly browned on top which was exactly how she likes it, so I lowered the door and slid a spatula underneath one slice to remove it. Unfortunately, though, I only succeeded in sliding it to the back of the oven.

Using a potholder, I pulled the rack out a few inches and tried again. I got one slice out but then managed to push the other slice off the rack at the back of the appliance where it landed vertically on the heating element.

Smoke started to billow from the unit and I remembered thinking, “Oh lord, will it set off the smoke alarm? Will it blare throughout the building? Will the automatic sprinklers be triggered?”

I knew I had to act fast and decided that if I was really careful, I could reach in and pull it out, which is what I did. The melted cheese, though, was hotter than I anticipated, and my arm reflexively jerked as I was withdrawing it from the oven, tapping the hot metal for just an instant.

But an instant is all it took to singe my skin and leave a 1 inch burn on my forearm.

Once I had Sally’s sandwich safely removed to a serving plate, it dawned on me that there had been a pair of aluminum salad tongs in plain view, sitting in a crock not a foot away from where this all unfolded. How could I not have thought of using the tongs?

Hopefully, the burn has permanently seared that piece of learning into my brain for quick access next time.

As I write this, I’ve made another decision. This time, though, it was a deliberative process that unfolded across the span of a few weeks.

One day, Sally announced that she was going to get her hair cut short after having let it grow out during COVID. I joked that that meant I should get mine cut, too, for the same reason. But then I started to think seriously about it.

I recall making a decision when COVID hit between letting my hair go long or getting a buzz cut that I could maintain with my beard trimmer. It was a coin-toss decision then, but I decided, what-the-hell, Sally has never seen me with long hair and it might be fun to have a pony tail.

So that’s what I did. And although I liked the pony tail, I didn’t like the look when I ‘let my freak flag fly,’ which was exactly the look that Sally adored.

But when I look in the mirror with my hair flying in all directions, I didn’t see me. Add to that the shedding all over the apartment and the maintenance (I actually started to dread taking a shower because it took so long to shampoo and condition it), and the decision pretty much made itself.

So my hair comes off next week. We’ll use a longer attachment on my trimmer than I use for my beard and see how that works. It won’t take long at all for us to learn whether doing it that way instead of going to the barber was a good decision or not!

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S2E47. Guest Blogger: Sally!

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to live with someone who is semi-obsessed with brain health? Although she didn’t sign up for that job when we re-connected after 41 years in 2011, Sally has found herself in just that position over the course of the past two years. Although skeptical of my latest career tangent, she has shown amazing flexibility and acceptance of the path I’ve led us down. So I asked her if she’d like to write an episode of what it’s like to ride shotgun with me. Here’s what she had to say:

“who knew that wayne’s changing his behavioral and mental approach to brain health would have so many real benefits for my health, too?

a once “i’ll-never-eat-that” food option is now one of my favorite side dishes. i’d previously tried kale in various iterations but never found it palatable. but that was before wayne discovered the magic of massaging it with a little salt and olive oil. what a difference!

and then there’s quinoa, for which my attitude had always been: “just not gonna happen.” but lo and behold, now i really enjoy the nutty flavor and look forward to it in many dishes.

kefir? it took me years to eat yogurt and this was a step beyond that. when wayne told me what it was, my gut reaction was: “no way.” it had no appeal for me whatsoever. but then he made some and now i eagerly enjoy it every night as our after dinner drink.

we are on this journey together. as you know, his change in habits goes well beyond food. we’ve lowered the night temperature in the apartment, constantly evaluate the air for impurities, and have adjusted the darkness in our bedroom so as to promote better sleep.

his recent experiment to change his circadian rhythm was so funny to watch! he religiously went to bed an hour earlier than the night before until he was going to sleep at 6pm and waking up at 2am. goodness! i would just shake my head and laugh as he said good night when it was still light out. luckily, my reading didn’t bother him and his turning all the lights on at 2 am didn’t bother me (i was in the bedroom and he in the living room). the reviews are mixed as to whether it was a successful venture, but it proved to me that this man will try almost anything to better his health and mind and soul.

i never envisioned these kinds of changes in lifestyle but it’s about damn time! exercising and eating healthy foods just makes good sense. and i love this man so i know we will continue to explore how to be healthy for as many years as we have left to us.” ***

Thank you…and back at ya!

But regarding the question of how many years we have left to us, she’s known my thoughts about that since our first date after re-connecting. We were both 60 at the time, and I asked her what she was planning on doing for the next 60 years. That makes it 11 down and 49 to go! She’s done well adapting to quinoa and kale, but I don’t think she’s quite wrapped her head around the idea of celebrating our 120th birthdays together!

*** Note: No, those are not typos in Sally’s essay. She has eschewed the use of capital letters ever since reading e.e. cummings when she was fifteen….and that was something I had trouble wrapping my head around when I was a freshman at Brown and reading her letters from home!

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S2E46. What Will I Remember?

About 25 years ago, when I was in my late 40s, my wife and I spent a week in Venice. Reflecting back on that trip, though, I only have a handful of memories…certainly not a week’s worth. Which makes me wonder: How much of our just-completed 12-day journey will I remember 25 years from now, when I’m 96?

I slept well every night with a lot of dreaming both on the trip and the week after, and I didn’t experience any anxiety or depression, so my brain has no excuse for not consolidating a lot of memories.

I’m pretty sure I’ll remember that we visited Greece, Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia and Italy, but the names of the ports are already eluding me. Without looking at the itinerary, I can name Athens, Santorini, Corfu, Dubrovnik, Zadar, Koper and Venice, but I already need help to fill in Katakolon and Kotor. I’ll be happy if I can recall 5 out of 9 a few years down the road.

One thing I know that I am certain to remember is tasting the fruit of a cactus that was growing alongside a cobblestone street. I picked one pod from a cluster and split it open with my thumbs to reveal its juicy, bright purple meat. It tasted bitter so one taste was enough. After dropping it on the ground, though, I noticed a smear of juice on my hand and so I licked it.

BIG MISTAKE!

Immediately, I felt the prick of a hundred tiny needles all around my tongue and the inside of my mouth. Unseen by me, the fruit was protected by a legion of tiny spikes that had come off in my hand when I opened it. That one lick transferred most of them to my tongue. Lesson learned…and never to be forgotten! (On the walk back to the bus, our tour guide identified the plant. It was an aptly-named prickly pear cactus!)

On the other hand, I already can’t remember on which excursion it happened.

I probably won’t forget the olive trees, which I had never seen before, that were as ubiquitous in Greece and Croatia as are vineyards in France and corn fields in rural Pennsylvania.

I tried to replay in my mind our tour of Lubljana, Slovenia, and did pretty well. Sally was impressed with the detail of my recollection. But I’m unable to recall the other excursions with as much certainty. A few images pop up, but I know that there is a lot I’m forgetting, and I have trouble connecting the images to the locations. Reminiscing with Sally should help remedy some of that.

Telling friends about our adventure should foster preservation of some memories. It will be interesting to see which experiences emerge as important enough to share.

The pictures we took will also help, but only if we look at them from time to time. The photos I’ve posted to the blog’s web site are the one’s I’m most likely to recall in the future because of their association with the blog in addition to the visit itself.

I’ll remember that the former Yugoslavia broke into 6 nations: Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. All 4 of the tour guides we had in the first 3 of those countries mentioned it and I realized that I was completely ignorant of that recent history, so I made an effort to commit it to memory.

I sat agape watching people walk by at the port in Kotor, Montenegro, stunned at their height. It turns out that they have the 3rd tallest population in the world. I felt like Gulliver in Brobdingnag…which should be unforgettable.

I’ll remember the rubbing alcohol taste and spreading warmth throughout my chest from drinking grappa. I won’t remember any of the paired wines from our gourmet on-board dinner.

I’m pretty sure I’ll recall the glass-making demonstration in Murano. We bought an art glass paperweight that is sure to remind us.

In all likelihood, though, I’ll forget the vast majority of the experience. Like my Venice trip a quarter of a century ago, there will probably be fragments, but not enough to conjure up the full 12-day trip.

Already—just a week since our return—much has faded. Memories are mischievously mingling and blending with one another, so I have difficulty sorting out what happened when and where.

But I’m going to try my level best to preserve the humbling awe I felt as I beheld the elegant majesty of the Parthenon, and the quiet thrill that surged through me as I stood on the starting line for the foot races at the original Olympic stadium where the games were held for more than a thousand years.

I believe in the maxim that it’s not the destination, but the journey that matters. I’d like to augment that sentiment by suggesting that it’s not the memories (which can fade) but the experience (knowing that you did it) that really matters. And so I’m hopeful that a quiet warmth will still well up within me when I’m 96 and someone mentions Montenegro—even if I can no longer picture it in my mind’s eye—and I’ll smile.

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S2E45. Home Again, Home Again!

Greece, Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia, Venice, West Chester, Pennsylvania!

As wonderful as the accommodations were on our trip, it was great to sleep in our own bed last night, especially after having woken up at 4am in Venice to begin the journey home.

4am in Venice. That’s 10pm in West Chester. It’s just mind-boggling that I had to get up at exactly the same time that I would normally be going to bed.

The flights home were quite the challenge. Did you know that Venice airport is a ‘silent’ airport? No announcements over the public address system until you get to your gate. It was borderline serene walking through the terminal.

Our first flight was a 2½ hour hop to Heathrow Airport in London. We arrived on time, but due to a labor shortage, there was no one to connect the walkway to our plane, so we sat on the tarmac for half an hour…which resulted in our missing our connecting flight to Philadelphia.

Heathrow is a sprawling city. Once we got into the terminal, we had to take a bus, a tram, an elevator, 2 escalators and then walk about a quarter mile to get to our gate. The security lines were long and the technology to move through the various passport and boarding pass checkpoints confusing. Fortunately, though, signage was clear and we muddled our way through in our sleep-addled state.

Once aloft, I decided to sleep as much as possible on the 8-hour flight while Sally decided to stay awake the whole time. We arrived in Philly around 5pm and we both went to bed at 9pm. It will probably take us 2-3 days to get back into our normal routine.

Reflecting back, the journey was both a feast and an assault on our senses, cognitive abilities and biological rhythms. Just the thing the doctor ordered for dementia prevention!

The sights and vistas were breathtaking across the 5 countries we sampled, topped off by the 27-hairpin turn climb to the 3,000 foot view from a mountain top in Montenegro back down to our ship in the turquoise harbor below.

We discovered that sunrises and sunsets don’t get old, no matter where or how often they are viewed.

The various on-board lectures and tour guide narratives filled our heads with new information about the last 4,000 years of history across the region. By the time we did the tour of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, I just couldn’t absorb another byte of information. Fortunately, it was our last day.

Food was a ceaseless adventure. Between the on-board options (ranging from buffet to gourmet with paired wines) and the tastes of local cuisines on land excursions, our taste buds joyously put in a lot of overtime.

Music was everywhere, from the guitarist in the nightclub to the Beatles songbook in the theater to the violin and cello duo in the atrium to the pianist in the lounge to the string septet concert in a 15th century church on the lagoon in Venice.

I’ve already described in depth the assault on our circadian rhythms as we adjusted to time zone changes. Add to that the assault on my gut biome that I believe was precipitated by my drinking caffeinated coffee every morning. After a few days, I was able to restore a bit of routine to my diet by replacing my usual breakfast granola with muesli and a plate of fruit. On the other hand, I continued to consume more sugar, flour, butter and bread than I had in months.

We didn’t have to worry about performing a lot of mental arithmetic to convert currencies as the euro and dollar are at parity right now. I was surprised, though, at the wide varieties of credit card readers that I confronted. Sometimes it took me a while to figure out whether to tap, swipe, scan or slide and where on the device to do it. Cashiers, though, were more than willing to guide me through it.

All in all, it was quite the adventure. We didn’t get lost during any of our free time (which surprised us) and we managed to muddle our way through every situation we confronted, even if it took us 2 or 3 passes to get it right.

To be honest, I’ve had enough neural stimulation in the last two weeks to last me for a while. I’m definitely looking forward to re-establishing my hum-drum routine and sticking with it…until the next time!

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S2E44. Greece!

We made it! We’ve spent the last several days island-hopping around Greece and as I write this we’re docking in Dubrovnik. I’ll be honest: I haven’t focused much (if at all) on brain health. I’ll assume you can understand why. Nonetheless, I’ll try to put together a few thoughts before heading out on our next excursion.

I felt I was prepared for the flight last Friday, having adjusted my sleeping and eating rhythms to accommodate 5 of the 7 hours we would cross during the flight. Serendipitously, Greece set its clocks back by one hour for daylight savings time the night we arrived, so I was gifted one more hour of transition time. What was left to absorb, then, was minimal: just 1 hour, or the equivalent of flying from Chicago to New York.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get much sleep on the plane. I used a neck pillow, lavender oil, loose-fitting clothes, and I ate a banana, but all to no avail. The engine noise, fellow passengers conversing loudly, and the impossible task of getting comfortable all conspired against me. Consequently, I was not a happy camper the next morning when we landed in Athens.

The good news, though, is that I don’t think I felt any effect of the time zone changes. Once I caught up on my sleep, I was fine.

Sally, on the other hand—having not made any effort at all to prepare for the time-shift—was…fine!

It seems that for both of us, the quality of the previous night’s sleep was far more impactful than the 7 time zones we had crossed.

Traveling is a brain-healthy activity because it presents a variety of unique cognitive challenges. Going on a cruise provides those opportunities in spades.

First off, there’s getting oriented on the ship. It took me several days to figure out how to find the important locations: our room, the different restaurants, and the theater. Oh, you could find your way around by reading the signage, but I wanted to be able to do it on my own.

First, I figured out that the various restaurants, although they were on different decks, were all at the back of the boat while the theater and the main lounge were at the front. These landmarks replaced north (theater) and south (restaurants) in my personal navigation system. Then I noticed that the even numbered rooms were ‘west’ and they got higher as you traveled from ‘north’ to ‘south.’ So as long as I could keep an image in my head of where the theater was (‘north’), I could figure out where anything else was whenever I emerged from an elevator.

Conversely, after only 2 days, Sally just knew which way to turn to get to where we were going.

Then there are the excursions with guides who present volumes of information along the way, on-board lectures, adjusting to at least a dozen different accents spoken by members of the crew, and absorbing the sights and vistas themselves. Add to that sampling new foods and meeting new people and you’ve created an intense synapse-stimulating environment.

On the other hand, maintaining a brain-healthy diet just ain’t gonna happen! I’ve been like a kid in the proverbial candy store pigging out at the buffets on sweets, pastries, carbs, meat and more alcohol than I’d consumed in a very long time. Leafy green vegetables? Nope. On the positive side, I am eating a boatload of fish and I’m making an effort to dose myself with fruits every morning at breakfast. I’m not at all looking forward to stepping on the scale when we get home.

We walk a lot on our daily excursions. Even though I don’t find myself breathing hard, I’ll assume that I’m getting my 30-minutes of cardio every day. There is a ¼-mile jogging track around the boat and a fitness center with treadmills and resistance machines, but I’m tired enough at the end of the day without pushing my limits with intentional exercise.

So I hope you’ll excuse me if I leave it at that for now and get back to the task of thoroughly enjoying this trip. I know…it’s a tough job…but somebody has to do it!

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S2E43: Three…Two…One…Liftoff!

Undaunted, I stumbled forward with a mild case of sleep deprivation into my 3rd week of attempting to reset my circadian rhythm to accommodate the 7-hour time difference I will experience when the plane lands in Athens tomorrow.

I took a closer look at our flight itinerary and saw that the flight leaves at 5:50pm eastern on Friday and arrives at 10:10am Saturday morning (9 hours in flight plus 7 time zones). It occurred to me that it would be wonderful if I could fall asleep right after boarding and get a full 8 hours of sleep during the flight, but, as we all know, sleeping on an airplane is spotty at best. What to do?

It turns out that Sally has a prescription for medical marijuana to help her sleep at night and so I thought it might work for me, too. The idea was that I would take one of her gummies as the plane was taking off and, hopefully, it would knock me out for the next 7-8 hours.

But what if it didn’t work? I was terrified at the thought of being seat-bound at 39,000 feet for 9 hours while high! My god, it would feel like all eternity before we landed!

So I decided to give it a test run this past Saturday night. Since it takes about an hour to kick in, I took it at 6pm and got in bed at 7pm, hoping to sleep through to 3am.

Wow…was that ever a mistake! Oh, I fell asleep quickly enough, but it was a nightmare the rest of the way. Every time I started to dream I would be shocked into awareness by the intensity of the dream. Sometimes it was just the vibrancy of the colors; sometimes it was the emotional content. Once awake, I became hyper-aware of my body which seemed to be making a lot of noise. I have no idea what that was about, but the bottom line was that it was keeping me awake. To make matters worse, I would check the clock after I thought I had gotten some sleep only to discover that not even half an hour had passed.

It was a long night, indeed.

I got out of bed at 3:30am feeling exhausted and a little wobbly on my feet. I bailed out on exercising and then slogged my way through the day.

Remind me never to do pot before going to bed!

So although taking a little something to help me sleep on the plane was a good thought, it definitely wasn’t going to work for me. As miserable as I was, I was thankful that I had done the experiment now rather than trying it for the first time on the flight.

I googled ‘sleeping on a plane’ to see if there were any helpful hints and, indeed, I found several in a nicely researched article (https://casper.com/blog/how-to-sleep-on-a-plane/). I’m pretty sure I’ll go with its recommendations to wear socks, dress in light layers, eat a banana, keep my legs uncrossed and wear a dab of lavender oil. I’ll also forego my morning green tea that is caffeinated.

My experience on Sunday night could not have been more profoundly different…or more welcome! I got in bed at 7pm and slept straight through until half-past three. More than 8 hours of sleep…it was glorious! I woke up bright and alert and couldn’t wait to hit the hall for my half-hour walk and then go down to the fitness center for another half-hour on the resistance machines.

I was a little surprised to find another resident in the fitness center at 4:30am, but then again, people work all kinds of schedules. Another resident showed up at 5am and headed for the treadmill. He lives on the same floor as I do and I had passed him every day I walked the halls as he made his way down to the fitness center.

I couldn’t wait to tell Sally about my sleeping triumph, but drowsiness overtook me a little while after she woke up. I unexpectedly found myself napping at 8am. What was up with that?

Doing the math, I realized that 8am eastern was 3pm in Athens. Knowing that my natural napping window was between 1pm-3pm gave me cause for celebration: although I still had 4 more nights to complete my adjustment, my napping schedule had already made the transition. This was certainly a good sign, no?

On Tuesday night, I went to bed while it was still light out (6pm) and got up at 2am the next morning. In case you were wondering, no, there was no one else working out in the fitness center at 2:30.

On Wednesday, the roll-on lavender oil I ordered arrived and I applied it to my temples before getting in bed. It smelled ok and I fell asleep without any trouble and I slept well. There’s no way to tell if it actually helped, though, but since nothing bad happened, I’ll use it on the plane today.

Reflecting back, making that first 2-hour time shift was brutal and my circadian rhythm fought me every minute of the day for several days, but the shift from going to bed at 8pm to 6pm was a breeze. Is it possible that my suprachiasmatic nucleus (which controls the circadian rhythm) has learned a new trick?

So that’s it. I’ve transitioned 5 hours out of the 7-hour time difference. I’m ready. I’ve trained hard. I can do this.

Look out, Athens, here I come!

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S2E42. Time Zones: Week 2

I’m sorry to foist this on you, but my experiment in preparing for a 7-hour time zone shift prior to our cruise is pretty much consuming my waking hours. And my sleeping hours, too, come to think of it.

This week was really rough on me. The good news is that I got into a rhythm of waking up at 4am as opposed to my normal 7:30am routine. But that was leaving me sluggish and pretty much wiped out during the day, even when I took a nap around noon.

It really had me perplexed because it was only 12 years ago that, following my first wife’s passing, I was on a regular schedule that had me getting up at 4:30am, working out on a treadmill and weight machine in my basement for an hour before showering and going to work. And I would feel physically fine and cognitively alert the whole morning (I had to be as I was a clinical psychologist on an acute care inpatient unit). Then I would take a nap in my office at noon and finish out the day, even putting in an extra hour or two at times.

So why was this so difficult? It appears that our circadian rhythms get a little cranky and less flexible as we age, but I didn’t think the difference between being 59 and 71 would have such a dramatic effect. Apparently, it does on me.

My new routine has me waking up at 4am and immediately walking for half an hour at a brisk pace. I moved my workout to first thing after waking up because I found I was too tired later on in the day to convince myself to do it.

Luckily for me, the new management company for our apartment building is renovating. They are painting the hallways a lighter color and changing the lighting so that it is like daylight out there…and early morning light is exactly what is called for when trying to fool your sleep-wake system into re-setting itself.

So my morning exercise of walking the halls (where 1 lap around is about 200 yards) is serving a dual purpose. If the hallways weren’t so fortuitously bright, I’d probably have to buy a light box and sit in front of it for a while after waking up. Thank goodness I lucked out and avoided that fate!

After my walk, I sit down with my computer, turn the brightness up full, and do The New York Times crossword puzzle, Spelling Bee, Wordle and Nerdle. It’s about then that Sally wakes up and I make her coffee and my tea to initiate our normal morning ritual. By then, the sky is starting to brighten and it feels like things are almost back to normal.

Sally is not all that enthusiastic about my attempt to prepare my body for Athens. Her natural rhythms would have her going to sleep around midnight, but she also likes to go to bed when I do, so my new hours have thrown a major monkey wrench into her routine. She reminds me that we went to Paris a few years back (6-hour time difference) and really didn’t do anything to fend off jet lag and neither of us can recall any severe effects. She has a point.

By 11am, I’m getting groggy and thinking about taking a nap. It takes me a while to appreciate the fact that I’ve already been up for 7 hours and I’ve worked out, so napping at 11am isn’t such an off-the-wall idea.

I’m eating dinner a little earlier than before (around 5:00pm instead of 6:30pm. After all, it’s not just your sleep but your hunger/digestive rhythms that need to adjust, as well.

Bedtime is the biggest problem. Early to bed means I can’t watch most of the Phillies games in the playoffs. Bummer! My compromise has been to get in bed around 9ish so I could at least watch a few innings. But that only left me the potential for 7 hours of sleep and, with the usual time it takes to fall asleep and the usual number of nighttime awakenings, I was only getting about 6 hours of actual sleep…and that just wasn’t enough for me, even with a mid-day nap.

So on Wednesday of this week, I moved my bedtime back to 8pm…and it worked like a charm! I got a good 7 hours of sleep and I felt fine the rest of the day. Now I know that I need to lock-in 8 hours in bed, no ifs, ands or buts!

As of today (Friday), I’ve got just 7 more days available to adjust. I’ve picked up half of the 7-hour transition I’ll be making, leaving a 3½-hour difference. I know I won’t be able to get all the way there, but I think I’d like to transition 1 more hour before we board the plane. That would be a 7pm bedtime and 3am awakening. Somehow, doing that never made it onto my bucket list!

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S2E41. Time (Zone) Travel

No sooner had I finished writing last week’s blog about sleep than it dawned on me that I had to start preparing for our upcoming Mediterranean cruise. We fly to Athens on October 29th which means that we have 3 weeks to adjust our sleep patterns to compensate for the 7 hours we’ll lose on the flight.

We booked the cruise months ago and I have been eagerly looking forward to it, but now all of a sudden it is imminent, and now, also, I am acutely aware that having my circadian rhythm out-of-joint for a week while I adjusted 1 hour per day was not the best way to get the most out of the trip. So I began the transition this week.

The task before me is pretty daunting. I normally go to bed around 11:30pm and get up at 7:30am. But in Greek time, that would be like going to sleep at 6:30am after pulling an all-nighter. Not good.

It’s my understanding that the kinder-and-gentler way to prepare for a trip like this is to start several weeks before the flight by going to bed 15 minutes earlier every night and waking up 15 minutes earlier until you are on schedule in your destination’s time zone. Compensating for the 7-hour difference, then, would take about 28 days using this system. I only had 21 days left until departure, though, so I figured I had to accelerate the pace a little.

The first night, I got in bed at 10:30pm and got up at 6:30am. Unfortunately, I had a lousy night’s sleep and was miserable most of the day. The good news here, though, is that since I’m retired, I can just take it easy and nap when the spirit moves me, which is what I did.

Then we went to the Jersey shore for two days. We picked the time to coincide with the October full moon. We thought it would be fun to watch it rise over the ocean, so we got a beachfront hotel room with a balcony on the 3rd floor with a pristine view of the ocean.

The sky was cloudless and the view of the red moon hurdling over the horizon at about 6:30pm was spectacular. It was shortly thereafter that I realized, “Hey…we can watch the sunrise tomorrow morning, too!”

Which is what we did. I only needed to get up by 6:00am to see it, but I happened to wake up at 4:30am and decided not to go back to sleep. Bundled up and sitting on our balcony, I was treated to the full spectrum of the sunrise. It began around 5:30am with a deep red-violet glow at the horizon that gradually brightened to a red-orange wash as the sky above it lightened to turquoise. The light show went on for an hour before the sun finally crested onto an already day-lit sky. Just beautiful!

And I did it again on Tuesday morning, going to bed at 9:30pm that night, and getting up at 4:30am on Wednesday.

We were back home in the apartment by then, so I turned on all the lights in an attempt to fool my body clock into believing that it was time to get up. I turned the brightness on my computer screen up as high as it would go and did crossword puzzles while waiting for the sun to rise. The view isn’t nearly as spectacular from the apartment balcony as it was from the shore, but the colors are just as rich and they provide a modicum of reward for the abuse to which I’m subjecting my body.

Getting up at 4:30am isn’t really agreeing with me…yet. I have to believe though, that it will get better with each passing day. I’ve made up nearly 3 of the 7 hours I’ll lose, so at least there’s that. I’ll admit, though, that I can’t really imagine myself going to sleep at 4pm (11pm in Greece) by the end of the month and feeling good about it.

And then there is the issue of food. I also have to change the times that I’m eating so that I’ll want breakfast and dinner at the right times while on the cruise.

For now, I’m feeling ok for about 4 hours after I get up, but then I fade fast. I’m eating whenever I get hungry, which now seems to be most of the time. I have no energy to exercise, but I at least try to take a walk every day. The fitness center in our apartment building is open 24/7, so maybe I can try to work out in the wee hours. It might be worth a shot. Bottom line: once your sleep rhythm is out of wack, it’s really hard to maintain a brain-healthy daily schedule.

Playing with all of my bio-rhythms at the same time is a strange experiment. I suppose it’s better to get all of this discomfort out of the way now rather than to find myself walking around in a fog as we visit the ancient empires of the eastern Mediterranean.

Lord, I hope so!

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S2E40. Going Back To Sleep

It was just 9 weeks ago that I posted a blog about sleep (S2E31. Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This) in which I described my lifetime relationship with sleeping and napping.

I thought I had said all I needed to say about sleep’s importance as one of the five pillars of preserving brain health, but The Universe seemed to have a different idea. All of a sudden my inbox and social media feeds were full of articles about sleep and sleep hygiene…and it wasn’t even National Sleep Awareness Week!

So I played along and watched a webcast of an interview with Matt Walker, Ph.D., a sleep scientist at the University of California-Berkeley (you can watch the 1-hour event here: youtube.com/watch?v=ZaxGiYyUcyI).

A lot of the information he presented was new to me, so I read his book Why We Sleep.

WOW…was I ever impressed! It was a real page-turner! He keeps his use of jargon and scientific terminology to a bare minimum and has a knack for selecting just the right analogies to make the research he details come to life. But it’s the content he covers that is truly mind-boggling. It was humbling to discover how little I knew about sleep.

Did you know that all creatures who live more than a day sleep? Including insects and worms?

Did you know that only one side of a dolphin’s brain sleeps at a time because it has to stay awake to surface and breathe?

Did you know that just one hour of lost sleep can significantly impair your cognitive abilities and possibly even kill you? Apart from all the laboratory studies that demonstrate this, we have an unintended real-life experiment that is run every year. It turns out that the day after daylight savings time goes into effect (and we lose an hour of sleep by turning our clocks forward), there is a spike in the number of fatal heart attacks and car accidents. Conversely, when we turn our clocks back in the fall (and gain an hour of sleep), there is a corresponding drop in heart attacks and traffic accidents.

Fascinating!

Apart from fun facts to know-and-tell, the research he described was simply amazing. He would begin by asking what happens when we sleep, then progress to how it happens, and end up answering the ultimate question: why does it happen?

For the purposes of this blog, though, the meaty part of the book involves sleep’s effects on memory.

Dr. Walker explains that the hippocampus maintains traces of your experiences each day and then, during sleep, it empties itself by sending important information out to a variety of cortical areas where it is permanently stored in the form of memories. It’s kind of like downloading the contents of a thumb drive onto your hard drive and then erasing it from the thumb drive so it has its full capacity available for the next day. One stage of sleep is responsible for transmitting the data and a different stage of sleep takes on the task of cementing it in place by strengthening the synapses where the information is stored.

If your early sleep is disturbed enough, the information won’t be transmitted and you won’t remember much the next day. If your sleep later in the night is disturbed, the newly planted memory won’t be consolidated and you won’t remember much, either.

So if you want to be able to remember more about what happened today, you’ll need a good 7-9 hours of high-quality sleep tonight…and for the next couple of days, as well.

If you don’t get good early sleep, the hippocampus won’t empty out and it will have limited storage space available the next day. That’s part of the dullness you feel when you haven’t slept well and accounts for some of the difficulty you have learning new information that day.

Unfortunately, once we get into our 60s, our sleep patterns begin to change…and not for the better. We tend to sleep fewer hours and the quality of that sleep is compromised by more awakenings…all of which wreaks havoc on our memory, immune system, emotional reactivity and judgement.

It also compromises the nightly cleansing of the day’s chemical detritus which includes beta amyloid and tau particles, the accumulation of which are associated with Alzheimer’s pathology.

The take-home message here is that it’s not true that we need less sleep as we age. We need the same amount of sleep that we needed when we were younger to allow all of these crucial processes to be executed every night. The problem is that we don’t get the sleep we need as often as we should.

Putting all this together, it’s no surprise that getting fewer than the recommended number of hours of sleep on a regular basis is a risk factor for dementia. The relationship is so strong that researchers are now exploring whether sleep patterns can be used to predict whether or not you will develop a dementia a few years down the road.

Dr. Walker ends the book with a listing of things you can do to maximize your chances of getting the sleep you need (spoiler alert: taking sleep medication is not one of them). Here’s a link where you can review them: https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/files/docs/public/sleep/healthysleepfs.pdf

The one change I made after reading the book had to do with my computer usage.

I’m usually on the computer right up until bedtime, but it turns out that that’s a terrible thing to do. You see, the LED screen of a computer emits strong light waves at the blue end of the spectrum. It is this wavelength of light that triggers your circadian rhythm which tells you when to wake up and when to go to sleep.

By bathing myself in blue light late at night, I was telling my brain that it was still daytime and so it delayed sending out the signal to initiate the sleep cycle until after I turned off the computer and went to bed.

I thought about changing my end-of-day routine, but realized I’m pretty much addicted to my computer use. Fortunately, the people at Apple have provided a solution. There is a program built into their computers and phones that will change the color emitted by their screens in the evening, going from blue-white to a soft yellow-amber. Problem solved! The program is called ‘Night Shift’ and you can find it by clicking on the ‘Display’ icon in System Preferences or Settings.

Alternatively, you can buy glasses that block the harmful wavelengths.

I’ll close with one more snippet from the book:

So, you ask, why is it that our circadian rhythm is triggered by blue light and not by full-spectrum sunlight?

You might recall that we are descended from fish and their aquatic predecessors. The circadian rhythm was an adaptation that evolved while we were living in water. But water filters out the other wavelengths of natural light leaving only the blues and greens. Eons ago, then, our evolutionary ancestors lived in a world that oscillated from darkness to blue and back again. And that’s the light pattern that controls your circadian rhythm to this very day!

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S2E39. The 50th Reunion

We were 21 and 22 years old. It was our last semester at Brown University. There were 7 of us: 4 girls and 3 guys. We shared the left half of a duplex at 43 East Manning Street in Providence, Rhode Island. It was 1972.

Five of us got together on Cape Cod this past weekend for our 50th reunion. We came from Oregon, California, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Pennsylvania. On Friday, we zoomed with the 2 missing classmates who live in New York and California. Although various combinations of us had gotten together over the years, this was the first time we had all been together since graduation day a little over half a century ago.

It was remarkably easy being together again in a shared living space. We brought photos and journals and letters we’d kept. We reminisced about how our group formed during the first 2 years at Brown, about our time on East Manning Street, and about the years since.

We shared memory after memory of our days together. Some of the stories were new to me. No one remembered everything. Some remembered more than others.

Some memories were pulled into consciousness from the deepest of slumbers. Others were made richer and more complete by hearing different perspectives of the same event.

There was one memory that only I of those who were there remembered. It was a sunny, crisp fall day during our sophomore year and we decided to walk to the Seekonk River which wasn’t very far away. On that afternoon, ripe milkweed pods were opening and the breeze was lifting the seeds out of their husks. Hundreds floated in the air all around us. It was snowing milkweed! I had never seen anything like that before, nor have I since.

I filled my pockets with the feathery fliers even though I didn’t know at the time what I would do with them. A few days later, I found a clear wine bottle and pushed them into it with a pencil. It was a sculpture…a work of art!

I kept that bottle through the years, brought it with me to the reunion, and told the story of how it came to be. As I sat looking at it, the Jim Croce lyric “If I could save time in a bottle” popped into my head and I realized that that is exactly what I had done.

I have no pictures from that period, so looking through the albums was, to me, astonishing. My visual memories were weak, faded, and in soft focus. Looking at those surprisingly unfaded color photos was like dusting off my own history, restoring it, and mounting it on the wall. I had forgotten how young we were.

Paraphrasing Hillary Clinton, it occurred to me that it takes a village to not only make a memory, but to preserve it.

In 2001—29 years after our time together and 21 years ago—I had occasion to try to capture our experience on paper. Here’s part of what I wrote:

“It was a time of passions expressed and passions denied; a time of independence, intimacy, intensity, and insufferable debate…but never, ever, indifference…Did any of us know that in that shortest of times we had permanently stitched ourselves into the fabric of each other’s lives?”

We toasted the good fortune that first brought our unlikely band together and we toasted the serendipity that allowed us to celebrate it a lifetime later. As we did so, we made more memories to carry with us to a future reunion: walking on the beach, avoiding poison ivy in the cranberry bog, making dinners, eating ice cream in an old schoolhouse, listening to oldies, doing a pot gummy, and visiting with 2 other classmates who were in the area.

And, of course, we took lots of pictures to share with the pair who could not attend and to fill an album that will help preserve these new memories for all of us.

I don’t think anyone wanted it to end. We joked about having a 75th reunion, but quickly realized we would be in our mid-90s, and so we decided we might want to do this again a little sooner than that.

In 1973, just one year after we graduated, Marvin Hamlisch wrote and Barbara Streisand sang ‘The Way We Were:’

“Memories

Light the corners of my mind

Misty watercolor memories

Of the way we were

Scattered pictures

Of the smiles we left behind

Smiles we gave to one another

For the way we were

Can it be that it was all so simple then?

Or has time re-written every line?

If we had the chance to do it all again

Tell me, would we?

Could we?

Memories

May be beautiful and yet

What’s too painful to remember

We simply choose to forget

So it’s the laughter

We will remember

Whenever we remember

The way we were

The way we were”

But we didn’t forget the painful parts. It was a unique combination of laughter and sadness and youth and intimacy and time and place that created the unbreakable bonds that we still feel so strongly today.

And to answer the song’s question, yes…I would do it all again. In a heartbeat!

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S2E38. Dementia Prevention: Brain Games

The notion that playing brain games on your computer can help prevent dementia is rooted in the research on neurogenesis and neuroplasticity.

Neurogenesis is the process whereby you can grow new brain cells at any age. Neuroplasticity is the process whereby you can grow new connections between neurons.

In theory, then, anything you do that (1) grows new brain cells, (2) increases the number of synapses between neurons, (3) strengthens cells and/or (4) protects them from harmful chemical interactions should all help slow down the process of cognitive aging. The recipe is pretty simple: bulk up your brain mass while minimizing the things that can cause it to atrophy.

But it’s not just a theory. The research supports this view.

Exercise grows new cells, increases synaptic connections and strengthens the quality of transmission of electric impulses from cell to cell by thickening the axon’s myelin sheath.

A brain healthy diet provides nutrients that support neurogenesis as well as antioxidants that help clean up neuron-killing chemical detritus (e.g., beta amyloid and tau) that are residuals of your body’s immune response (i.e., inflammation).

Sleep expels toxins that accumulate on a daily basis and also increases the strength of neuronal connections (synapses) which form long-term memories.

When we engage in cognitively challenging activities—especially new and novel tasks—we create more connections. That is why reading a book, learning to play an instrument or to speak a new language, and navigating around a different environment (e.g., traveling) are all brain healthy activities.

But what about playing computer games? The evidence is spotty, but it seems that there might be something there. Enough, anyway, to justify millions of dollars of new research to try to nail down just what it can and can not do.

In S2E29: Brain Training Is Hard Work! I discussed the intense effort I expended during my first week of working with the BrainHQ program. Now, 9 weeks later, I have some data I can report.

First, let me say that I over-did it. Playing these games for an hour each day was exhausting. However, it did allow me to quickly work my way through all 29 tasks covering 6 different functions: attention, brain speed, memory, people skills, intelligence and navigation. After 5 weeks, I dropped down to 30-minute daily workouts, which was much more manageable.

So how did I do?

The program provides you with a percentile ranking that shows how your performance compares to others in your same-age cohort. After 9 weeks, my scores have leveled off and I’m not seeing any more improvement. I placed at the 89th percentile overall among 71-year olds, with individual domain scores that range from the 86th to the 94th percentile.

What is valuable about this is that I now have a baseline measure of my mental status. Going forward, if I maintain my 89th percentile ranking relative to my same-age peers, it will mean that I am aging normally. If that number drops, it will mean that my cognitive decline is a cause for concern. If it goes up, it will be a cause for rejoicing as it will suggest that I am not experiencing the expected pace of cognitive decline.

That information has practical value, too. It appears that measurable and accelerating cognitive decline starts to appear about 6 years before a diagnosis of dementia is usually made. If I continue to play these games on a regular basis over the coming years, my scores should serve as an early warning system of any emerging cognitive problems.

The alternative, of course, is to get a full neuropsychological workup every year. Playing computer games is a lot cheaper and more fun, though.

The knock on using brain games to promote brain health is that, although you can get better at the games, your new learning does not generalize to everyday life and so it has no clinical or practical significance, even if your scores continue to improve.

This past Sunday, though, I actually had a real-life experience for which I directly attribute my success to one of the games I’ve been playing.

In this game, designed to enhance your speed of visual processing, the computer screen is divided into 8 pizza slice shaped segments. Images of 11 birds are then briefly flashed all at once around the periphery. One of the birds, however, is different from the rest. For example, it might have a white body instead of a rust-colored body, or a white wing instead of a black wing. The task is to click on the slice of the screen where the odd bird appeared.

The more I played this game, the better I got. After a while, I was stunned at how accurate I was with only the briefest glimpse of birds on the screen.

Which raises the logical question: So what?

I’ll tell you what! Last Sunday, we were having breakfast at the home of Sally’s son and daughter-in-law. Tammy mentioned that she had seen a bird fly away from their backyard bird house, but couldn’t tell if it was a blue jay or a bluebird.

As we stood around talking in the kitchen, out of the corner of my eye through the sliding glass doors I saw the flash of a bird in flight. It was only a flash of color that lasted less than a second, but I was able to process its shade of blue and size, realizing immediately that it was a bluebird.

Impressive, huh?

Then we moved outside to eat breakfast. While we were seated around the table, Sally’s grandson Ryan (who recently graduated from college) brought out a bottle of champagne to make mimosas. When he popped the cork, it rocketed through a gap in a vine-covered fence and landed on the lawn beyond. I was the only one who saw where it went.

Pretty cool, eh?

OK. So it’s no big deal…but it does suggest that something good is happening inside my head thanks to my computer game playing.

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S2E37. This Is Your Brain On Pot

In the interest of full disclosure:

I first tried pot at the end of my freshman year at Brown. The following semester was when I indulged the most. I was not considered a ‘head’ or ‘freak’ by any stretch of the imagination, but I would take a hit when offered and my longish hair and goatee fit the profile of those who merited an offer.

I was terrified of getting busted, so I never bought any of my own, but always made contributions to the kitty.

There was no real research about marijuana usage at the beginning of the 70s, just strong opinions based on folklore and urban legend. ‘Reefer Madness’ taught us that pot was a gateway drug to heroin, but whenever someone told me that junkies started with pot, I’d reply that pot users all started with milk. End of conversation!

I smoked enough to have a decent complement of weed stories to tell over the course of the coming decades, but I cut back dramatically during the second half of my sophomore year when I had a close encounter with depression and my therapist advised me to give it up.

I used pot sporadically over the course of my last two years at Brown as I settled on beer as my go-to party drug. In the 50 years since graduating, I think I’ve gotten high maybe 15 times, at most.

Which brings us from the 70s to my 70s where the marijuana world has changed dramatically.

Pennsylvania has legalized cannabis for medical use and so Sally got a prescription to treat her insomnia. For reasons unknown, edibles are not offered in PA, so we drive over to New Jersey where both medicinal and recreational pot is available, including edibles in the form of gummies. Would it surprise you to learn that we picked up some recreational edibles while we were there?

Getting high is different from what it was lo those many years ago. Don’t get me wrong. It’s still fun: music packs a strong emotional wallop, ripples on the surface of the pool are infinitely interesting, and the food is…well…you know! Nonetheless, it’s different. It’s no longer part of a cultural movement. It doesn’t hold the same promise of self-discovery and revelation.

And some things just plain suck. For example, back in the day, you’d start to tell a story and then forget what you were going to say. That didn’t happen when you weren’t stoned and so it was really funny when it did. Now, though, I can lose my train of thought when I’m stone-cold sober, which is irritating enough, but when it happens while I’m trying to have a good time, it really pisses me off!

There was concern back in the day about possible long-term cognitive effects of regular marijuana use, but the research hadn’t been done yet. Fifty years later, there is still a dearth of information, but a few studies stand out.

Long-term chronic use is associated with reduced prefrontal brain volume. Heavy use has also been found to lower cognitive performance among teenagers several weeks after their last high. However, it appears that the effects of marijuana use among older Americans have been largely ignored. A 2019 review of the literature summarized the thin evidence this way:

“Marijuana (with chemical compounds THC and CBD) causes impairment in short-term memory; increases heart and respiratory rates, elevates blood pressure; and contributes a fourfold increased risk for heart attack after the first hour of smoking marijuana. These effects may be pronounced in older Americans with compromised cognitive or cardiovascular systems.”

These effects, though, are experienced while you are stoned. There is next to nothing to be found about long-term effects on the brain. Interestingly—and counter-intuitively—there was one study I came across suggesting that marijuana use might be helpful in recovering from brain injury, as it appears to have neuro-protective qualities!

Other articles mentioned the problem of driving under the influence because reaction times are impaired which leads to more accidents, as well as the respiratory problems associated with smoking pot which, while not as damaging as cigarette smoke, are still rough on your lungs.

So what’s a Baby Boomer to do?

First, edibles appear to be easier on your body than smoking weed, but it will take a lot longer to get high, so be careful about dosing.

Second, don’t drive or operate heavy machinery while stoned!

(Learn more about these 2 points here: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/12/well/live/driving-while-high-marijuana.html )

Third, although ‘chronic’ usage (apparently more than 16 times per month) has been shown to be harmful, there are no reported studies about occasional use. That doesn’t mean that it’s not bad for you, it just means that it hasn’t been studied. But if you have to choose between alcohol (which is a known neurotoxin) and marijuana (which isn’t), well, that appears to be a no-brainer.

Of course, you always have the option of abstaining from mood-altering chemicals altogether, which is probably the safest position you can take when it comes to maintaining brain health.

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S2E36. Dodging Dementia Bullets

Dementia risk-management was not something that was on my mind when I was 20. Or when I was 30, 40, 50 or even 60, for that matter. Had it been, I would have been shit out of luck because the research had not been done yet and so there were no guidelines to work with.

Looking back at my life, though, it appears that I did a pretty good job of dodging high-risk dementia-related behaviors. Of course, I could not have done it intentionally because I didn’t know what those behaviors were, so basically, I lucked out. But as Pippin’s father Charlemagne told him: ‘It’s smarter to be lucky than it’s lucky to be smart!’

Here’s a partial summary of my smart luck. I’ve highlighted risk factors for dementia in bold.

Let me start with something that’s not a behavior at all: my genetic makeup. First and foremost, I was born a male. For reasons that are still not yet fully understood, women are at higher risk for developing dementia.

Secondly, it appears that I did not inherit the dreaded APOE4 gene which is linked to early onset Alzheimer’s. My mother demented at around the age of 83, but her sister was cognitively spry when she died at 94. Nobody on my father’s side lived long enough to find out if there was any dementia lurking there.

Like most boys growing up in the 50s and 60s, I played tackle football with pads after school every day in the fall. I was pretty small for my age, earning the nickname ‘shrimpotz’ in 4th grade, and I was still only 130 pounds when I got to my sophomore year of high school, so I figured playing football was hopeless and switched to running. The lucky thing here is that I was never knocked unconscious or had a concussion. Another risk factor averted.

Not only did I dodge that bullet, but running became a lifelong habit. I was in the first cohort of joggers to take to the streets, back when it was considered cool for cars and trucks to try to run you off the road. Unknowingly, I had adopted one of the 5 core behaviors for reducing dementia risk…and I did it at a very early age.

I also lucked out when it came to education. I started school in Newark, NJ, where the quality of the education offered had already begun its decline from the system that produced Philip Roth in the 1940s to the one that failed and was taken over by the State of New Jersey in the 1990s. When I was about to enter 4th grade, my parents were able to move us to a town with some of the best schools in the state. I flourished there and wound up getting into Brown University.

All of that was fortuitous because, as it turns out, attending a high quality elementary school and going to college are both protective factors. Again, lucky me!

But it didn’t stop there. When I was 44, I decided to become a psychologist and so I spent the next 6 years in graduate school, first at Marywood University in Scranton, PA, and then at the University of Connecticut. Once again, I didn’t do it to promote my long-term brain health, but we now know that that kind of intense cognitive challenge involving learning new skills and information is also one of the pillars of dementia risk-reduction.

Along those lines, I suppose it also helped that I changed careers every 10 years and that all of those careers were people-oriented.

With its heavy doses of sugar, refined flour, saturated fats, beef and fried foods, the American diet is a notorious contributor to dementia risk. For a long time, I ate with abandon in service to my taste buds, ignoring calories, cholesterol and fat content. Can you say “large pizza with extra cheese, sausage and pepperoni?”

Fortunately, I did not have a sweet tooth and my metabolism did not lend itself to excessive weight gain. Thus I dodged two more dementia bullets in spite of myself: diabetes and obesity.

My worst period in terms of unhealthy eating was when we were running our B&B. I was the cook, serving up eggs, bacon and breakfast pastries every day. And every day I ate what I was cooking. By the end of that run, though, I realized that I needed to make some changes. There was a history of heart disease on my father’s side (it killed both him and his father when they were around 60), so I figured I better start eating a heart-smart diet. The research for that was plentiful, so I gave up red meat, began using low-fat products, and ate more vegetables, fish and pasta. As fate would have it, all those changes were helpful in maintaining brain health (and constitute another pillar of a brain-healthy lifestyle). I was in my 40s at the time.

I was never a big drinker. In fact, I was a cheap drunk, getting tipsy on just 2 beers. In college, I tried to become a ‘better’ drinker (you can imagine the peer pressure) and even managed to down a 6-pack of Schlitz one night before passing out. But excessive drinking was not in the cards for me. That doesn’t mean that I never got drunk because I did when the occasion merited it. But I never really liked the taste, whether it was beer, wine or hard liquor. Even now, it’s hard for me to drink a few ounces of red wine with dinner, but I do it for the purported brain-health benefits.

On the other hand, I never had any desire or interest in smoking. I hated it ever since I was in grade school and my parents used to light up at the dinner table at the end of the meal. I became an anti-smoking advocate at an early age, so much so, that people were astonished to learn that I had smoked pot! Oh, I suppose I took in my fair share of second-hand smoke (my first wife of 36 years was a smoker), but I think its safe to put this in the ‘dodged a bullet’ column, too.

There are a few other risk factors I haven’t covered here. You can see them all at this link to see how lucky you’ve been:

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/dementia/dementia-prevention/

Finally, there is one risk factor I haven’t yet dodged, and it’s the biggest one: age. The older you are, the greater your chances of dementing. But dodging that bullet is a good thing, isn’t it? 🙂

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S2E35. The Fog Of Memory

It was the spring of 1986. I had quit my job in Newark, NJ, and we had moved out to Tyler Hill, PA, where we were renovating an 1847 farmhouse with plans to open a B&B by the 4th of July weekend.

I was in one of the bedrooms on the 2nd floor where I was removing more than a century’s worth of floral print wallpapers. The work was slow and painstaking, first soaking small sections in a solution of vinegar and water and then scraping it carefully so as not to gouge the plaster beneath it.

It was also pretty mindless. After a while, I started to replay memories. I was 35 at the time, so my just-ended career in Newark, high school and college years, and growing up were not all that long ago.

I seemed to be watching the movie of my life playing in reverse. The farther back I went, the faster the reel seemed to spin, until I saw my baby pictures in my mind’s eye and the movie ended.

I felt inexplicably exhausted, so I lay down on the floor and closed my eyes…and a feeling of relief swept over me. Suddenly, I felt unburdened by my past and all the emotional baggage that came with it.

I soon realized that all those memories were no longer as close and vibrant as they had been just a few moments before. It was as if I had packed them all into boxes and moved them up to the attic.

Whatever happened that day was not intentional on my part, but it seems to have repeated itself every 10 years when I switch careers. It’s as if I hold on to a ton of potentially relevant information in case I need it, but then put it into long-term storage as soon as I don’t.

It happened again last year when I ended my 10-year career volunteering for the Democratic Party. No sooner had I quit as chair of the local organization than my memories of a decade’s worth of campaigning became remote. They had joined the previous sixty years worth of boxes in the attic of my mind, in a place that I refer to as ‘ago’ to differentiate it from the here and now.

I envy people who say they remember events as if they were yesterday. I have no such ability. When I rummage around in one of those boxes, my recollections appear as photographs, not movies. And they are definitely not high-def! Many have shifted perspective, so I have a bird’s eye view instead of my actual eye-witness perspective.

Many memories have been replaced by memories of the photographs of those events which I’ve viewed over the years. It’s a poor substitute, but it’s all I’ve got at this point.

Although I can’t conjure up strong visual images, I have detailed memories of the stories I’ve told about those long-ago events. My semantic memory (i.e., the facts surrounding events) is much stronger than my visual recollections. Auditory memory is pretty much non-existent.

Occasionally, strong emotional memories will surface. A feeling—sometimes triggered by a smell—will overwhelm me. I can’t always place it, but it’s familiar…and usually warm and pleasant.

I remember myself through a fog. I can still make out the shapes of my past, but they’re distant. I know that all of these things are part of me, but I just can’t see them all that well, even though I can describe them in great detail.

I have no idea whether this is normal or not. I don’t think it’s gotten worse with age. I think I’ve always been like this…but I’m not sure because I don’t think I thought about it when I was younger.

Which makes me wonder where it goes from here.

I’ve been watching a series of lectures on the ‘Joy of Mathematics’ from TheGreatCourses.com. I remember loving math classes in high school and being good at it. I remember the joy of solving equations. I graduated from Brown just 2 courses short of meeting the requirements for a degree in math.

Yet watching these lectures has shown me that the lion’s share of all that learning and studying is completely gone from my memory. I know: use it or lose it. But it still seems a shame. And it raises the specter of vast stores of memories falling into a black hole from which there is no recall.

That possibility makes even foggy memories look really good by comparison!

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