Given that my brain and body do whatever they want to these days regardless of my intentions, I hope I can keep this post in the road. It feels like I'm no longer in charge, like I've been body-snatched by evil-doing poltergeists. As evidence:
1) I'm slow at everything I do.
2) I'm impatient with time spent on things I don't want to do (which includes all maintenance of belongings and self. I don't know if you've noticed, but those things take up most of our time at any age).
3) I can't abide interruption and I'm distractible as hell.
4) I can't find words...that tip-of-tongue problem based on word
5) I can't recall the proper sequence of steps in a task I've performed a million times before (ex: make a spaghetti dinner or get dressed). I'll be on the last step and suddenly find I'd forgotten Step 3...which can be critical if it involves either olive oil or underwear.
6) I get tired long before I'd expected to, which means I have trouble with biting off more than I can chew and with task completion.
7) I can't seem to make decisions.
First, on that infuriating word-retrieval glitch, apparently the density of the gray matter in the left insula of my brain has declined. It may have been redeposited on the inside of my thighs just above the knee; I KNOW I was really dense at one time and these knee-bulge thingies were NOT there yesterday. I think my best defense against left insula theft is to learn a new word each day and to use that word frequently. On Wordsmith.org, today's word is cabal, from the Hebrew kabalah, meaning a small, secret group of intriguers or plotters. In proper usage, My word retrieval issues can be blamed on an Idaho-based cabal of right-wing extremists who are bent on destroying the density of the left insulas of Liberal Elitist bloggers. Good word to know. Some of you could be next.
There's a surprising number of studies out there lately that try to put a positive spin on the brain changes I describe. I'm increasingly suspicious of this sort of thing; what motive could the cabal possibly have for making dodderism look good? There are studies at Stanford that show that, among the aged, our brain efficiency is improved by filtering out our "irrelevant" long-term memories so that we can put more mental energy toward the more immediately relevant short-term memories, or working memories, such as where we put the olive oil. We don't even get to decide for ourselves what's relevant and what isn't, which is mind control. Maybe they do it through reality shows on the television.
Researchers have gone so far as to rob mice of full neuron development in their hippocampi, where long-term memory is stored, in an effort to improve their performance on maze-running tasks (similar to my spaghetti-dinner-making task). Guard your hippocampi, my fellow elders, and avoid cooking for crowds. In fact, I'd recommend that, as soon as you get the kids out of the house, you stop cooking altogether.
Even AARP gets in on the conspiracy cover-up by pretending there's nothing going on. In their article "Boost Your Brain Health," P. Murali Doraiswamy, M.D., claims that,
Despite what our youth-oriented culture tells us, mental decline after 50 is not a given. In fact, in some ways the healthy brain gets stronger with age. Studies confirm that accumulated knowledge and expert skills (a.k.a. wisdom) increase as you get older...Other brain functions may not improve with age, but they don't automatically wane either. One example is higher-order decision making such as choosing the best investments. Older people do as well as younger ones on tests that measure this function—as long as they aren't rushed.Oh, yeah. A bunch of us must have been a little rushed between the tech bubble of the nineties and the beginning of the Great Recession when we were trying to decide where to safely invest our retirement savings...real estate, mutual funds, hmmm. After basically saying that most healthy brains experience few problems with aging other than some short-term memory loss, Dr. Duraiswamy goes on to devote an entire article to recommendations for improving brain functioning in the elderly. Well, which is it? Are we all losing it or just those of us who happened to be in the right place at the wrong time when the spaceship landed looking for experimental subjects?
Where was I? On that distractibility issue, I am self-diagnosed with A-RADD (Age-Related Attention Deficit Disorder), but, according to my sure-fire spaghetti-sauce diagnostic tool, this problem came on very suddenly
The researchers used electroencephalography to record electrical signals from the participants’ brains in milliseconds during the task. In contrast to the younger adults, the older group could not suppress distracting stimuli during the first 200 milliseconds after exposure. “At later time points, the ability to ignore does show up,” Gazzaley says. “It’s not abolished, just delayed.” By then, however, the irrelevant information had interfered with the memory task, making the older group less accurate overall than the younger group.I think they're saying that my A-RADD developed suddenly at age 60, which is about when I woke up to find myself instantaneously old and prone to parenthetical digression (that was when all my slacks stopped fitting me, too), and that I should ignore the first 200 milliseconds of any task I take on. I'm going to ignore Adam's research; I don't know how it got in here.
It's not funny. There's even research to show that our sense of humor is being effed with! From the Journal of The International Neuropsychological Society, I learn this:
In research designed to probe humour comprehension and appreciation, Shammi and Stuss found that while older people were just as capable as younger people of "getting" wordplay jokes, they were not as good at recognising funny cartoons, or identifying funny punch lines to jokes.The punch line to that joke is that these guys were named Shammi and Stuss. Obviously, I've not lost a tittle of my humor comprehension. As for funny cartoons...
I was beginning to tire of all this research after about fifteen minutes, so I decided to drop the item-by-item schema and look for some large, over-arching theory to explain my whole list of complaints. That's when I learned of the Dark Energy in my brain, as covered by the March 2010 issue of Scientific American. Basically, they've discovered through modern imaging studies that our brains actually use more energy in the background of our minds when our attention is turned off, when we're daydreaming or sleeping, than it does when we're paying attention. When we're focused on something, the brain actually slows down. They call this background hum the brain's Default Mode, and, when the connections in the Dark Matter become faulty with disease processes or aging, there's less efficiency altogether. That all sounds sort of Black Ops-y to me, like somebody's hacked into my meat computer and fiddled with my Default Mode.
I can't find that issue of Scientific American. It's here somewhere, I know. I even highlighted the kerfluey out of it to share with you. I have absolutely no idea where it went, unless a shadowy cabal is involved. Is it age? Is it me? Is it a vast Right Wing Conspiracy headed by Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney designed to turn aging voters into mindless lemmings? They made off with my highlighter, too.
[images: www.textually.org/.../
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