Not too long ago, I lost both my parents—they died within seven months of each other. (They'd been divorced for 35 years and lived on different continents, but that's another story.) Both of them succumbed to dementia, for very different reasons: My dad's was exacerbated by a brain tumor, and my mother had vascular dementia, the result of a stroke.
It was devastating to see them this way, and it still makes me cry when I think about it too much. Plus, I'm now full of the fear that one day I'll be overcome by dementia, or maybe Alzheimer's, too.
I know I'm not the only one: Many of my friends are seeing their parents become feeble-minded, and we're all convinced that whenever we can't find our keys or stumble over a word, we're showing early signs. This feeling is possibly exacerbated by the fact that any time you flip past a local PBS station, they seem to be airing infomercial-like programs about the aging brain—The Secret Life of the Brain; Brain Fitness and Neuroplasticity; The UltraMind Solution; Change Your Brain, Change Your Life—ad infinitum, telling us all the things we need to do to slow down the process. (Take fish oil! Eat avocados! Learn a new language!)
Now a new report has been released by the Alzheimer's Study Group, headed up by Sandra Day O'Connor and Newt Gingrich (?!), to determine how to deal with a looming Alzheimer's epidemic (it already afflicts 5 million Americans and in 20 years, warns the study, Alzeimer's cases will increase by 50 percent). So, okay, I'm even more alarmed.
I bought a couple of books about keeping the brain flexible and even some CDs: They remain unread and unripped. But recently, apropos of something else entirely, I came across a weekly podcast called—heh—BrainCast, by the folks behind the BrainReady web site, which delivers episodes that run around 30 minutes running the listener through little mind exercises that they promise will help keep your mind sharp. It embraces all the tenets preached by the PBS brain experts hawking their pricey books and CDs and computer programs: Eat certain brain-healthy foods, exercise regularly and challenge your brain to do things it doesn't normally do—the surest route to brain atrophy, I've heard many times, is to stick to the same old routines. Which is exactly what every old person you've even known does.
I've listened to a few of these podcasts and they're kinda great: There are simple math problems you have to solve in your head (and I'm useless at math, I was always put in the dumb math class at school, so that's a serious challenge for me); visualization and memory exercises, and logic quizzes. It seems a little simplistic, but I swear, after listening to the 4th episode in the series, I felt a little clearer minded today. Maybe it's just mind over matter. But maybe that's exactly the point.
An experiment: I'm going to listen to an episode or two a day until I get up to 20. I'll report back on my progress.
UPDATE: Okay, it's a week later and I was diligent with this for the first, oh, four days? And it's great! But, like everything, it takes commitment—there's homework, for instance, such as drawing a sketch of your living-room layout from memory. Then there's setting that 30 minutes aside each day to just sit still and listen. Harder than it sounds! Especially when you're also trying to carve out 30-minute slices of time all day long for other tasks, like going for a morning run or filing for a tax extension or eating some goddamn lunch. But I did buy the matcha green tea and have integrated dark chocolate and walnuts into my diet. Brain foods, ya know. That's something!
