Our glorious grown-up brains

In an airport recently I picked up Barbara Strauch's best-seller, The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain. Now, technically, I'm a little more than grown-up: technically I should be over the hill — yet mysteriously, like you, I am not.

Research old and new explains why on the one hand, I can't for the life of me remember whether I've read that book by whatsisname, and on the other hand, I believe that mentally I'm in peak form. Turns out these are both facts, and they're not incompatible, not at all.

Mature people are inclined to tell the identical story twice... or many times ... to lapse into a conversational loop. And I've already told this story once. So please go direct to my business blog:
Your Miss Marple Brain at work and play.

I talk about this on a video. So you get to not exactly chat with me, but be chatted to. Bye now.

Grandparents is not a synonym for elderly

This headline appeared in the Dominion Post, 19 October 2009:
Surfing's good for grandparents.

First sentence:

Internet use can boost the brain activity of the elderly, potentially slowing or even reversing the age-related declines that can end in dementia, researchers found.

The study was by Gary Small, professor of neuroscience and human behaviour at UCLA,and his colleagues. The results are fascinating, but they have nothing to do with grandparents. Possibly some of the 24 people studied were grandparents, as they were aged between 55 and 78. Possibly not.

The journalist, I'm guessing, was not of grandparenting age. Otherwise he or she would have noticed that:

• not everyone over 55 is a grandparent
• variables among subjects concerned age and internet use, not grandparenting
• the scientists used the terms older people and older adults, not grandparents.

First-time internet users find boost in brain function after just one week
P.S. Tim Jones points out that not all people over 55 are grandparents, either. A friend of his was a grandmother at 34.

Left hand writing and right hand writing

Writing with your non-habitual hand is an easy, interesting way to trigger the brain to behave differently.

This is old, old information. I'd use it in writing groups: we'd all write with our left hands (or right, for lefties) for 10 minutes. Often, people were astonished by the words they wrote: apparently an alien had done the writing. Liberating, it was.

Well, I hadn't done that for years. But recently, as part of the save-my-brain-campaign, I've started writing shopping lists and such with my left hand.

The content doesn't surprise me. It's still the same old shopping list:
bread
yoghurt
coffee
oranges
iPhone
character dancing shoes
and so forth.

The surprise is in the writing style. Much more legible than my normal writing, which has been out of control for decades. More rounded and childlike, less pointy and mean. A little similar to my father's writing.

If the alien takes over, what will my shopping lists look like then?

Save my brain - learn Hamlet

As part of the great Save My Brain Campaign I decided to do some rote learning. But what to learn?

Taking the laziest option, I chose Hamlet's first soliloquy: O that this too, too solid flesh would melt...Laziest? Because that's what my grandmother used to recite to maintain her formidable brainpower.

So I did. It took me a verrrrry long time, a week. (Young actors can get a whole script down in that time.) And now I need to keep repeating it, to nail it into my long-term memory. If I have such a thing, at my age.

The process is pretty interesting. You have to get it absolutely right, complete with all the syllable-fillers such as "Fie on't! Ah, fie!" and "God! Oh God!" and "Heaven and earth!" And it's those bits where I hesitate sometimes, Alas! woe is me!

Interestingly, the speech seems to get shorter and shorter. As I get more confident (sometimes racing through like R2D2), I'm inclined to stop and think (always fatal). I think, "Surely I can't have reached that bit already? I must have missed a line."

Morning and night I say this mournful, desperate speech in my mind. I imagine my mind has already begun working more lightly and quickly. That's absurd, surely. And incongruous, because the speech itself is the ultimate in neurotic despair.

That's why I'm moving away from Hamlet. A friend suggested the psalms. Great idea. But of course, I'll be picky. None of those doom and gloom and apolocalyptic psalms for me.