Brain atrophy vs. them learnin' books

I thought this was really interesting, especially for my highly-educated parents, who are approaching their 70's and trying not to be terrified of Alzheimer's or other dementias:
Higher education lowers dementia risk.

First of all, they provide support for the title's preposition that higher ed does help against dementia risk, which is a compelling idea on its own. Fleshing out the topic, the second half of the press release is particularly interesting. They define dementia "risk" as the inability to cope with one's changing brain, since dementia is an experience of symptoms and not a specific physical problem of the brain. The implication is that since more educated/flexible brains cope better, it takes a higher level of physical pathology to manifest the actual impairment that would display the symptoms to be called "dementia." It sounds a bit like splitting hairs/psychobabble, but it's really very profound. Basically, education adds resiliency to the brain, so it can adapt to and endure brain changes and the person still experiences a fairly normal life. It's really cool to see some real meta-analytical evidence of this theory!

It's kind of like the recent recommendation that doctors stop screening for prostate cancer after age 75 because even if a man gets it, he'll probably die from something else first. So he'll have prostate cancer, but won't experience any symptoms, so who cares? Why worry about it or go through painful treatments if it won't change anything? Again, it sounds strange to think of that as a good thing, but since I value quality of life, I see it as great. The chances that I will have the brain pathology that could cause dementia are equal to others in my age group, I have no physical advantages. But the chances that I will actually experience dementia are much lower. And that goes for pretty much everyone in my family, particularly my dad. He has both a Ph.D. and a very sincere fear of his mind diminishing before his body. I sent him this article in the hopes that it will alleviate some of that fear. Now for the next step, I'd like to see the relationship between fear of dementia and experience of dementia. (So all you neuroscientists reading this blog, you know, get on that.)

Psychology has repeatedly shown that when it comes to brains you either "use it or lose it." So get educated earlier in your life to build your brain's coping and flexibility, then keep using your coping skills throughout your life to maintain them, and you'll end up so far ahead that as your brain starts to fail you won't notice!

And that's my musing on science for the morning.

Why it's great to have dogs

Because when you leave they look like this...

...and you know they love you.

Amazing Obama picture

My buddy Chris, who is super duper just sent me this link: http://www.davidbergman.net/blog/2009/01/22/how-i-made-a-1474-megapixel-photo-during-president-obamas-inaugural-address/ or the fullscreen version at: http://gigapan.org/viewGigapanFullscreen.php?auth=033ef14483ee899496648c2b4b06233c.

It's a Google-Earth-style superdetailed panoramic picture of the crowd at Obama's inaugural address. You can zoom in and drag the picture around.

You can play "Where's Waldo" looking for what I found:

-Barack Obama
-FORMER president Bush
-Dr. Evil, whoops I mean Dick Cheney
-Clarence Thomas taking a nap
-The Bush twins holding hands and... praying?
-Billary
-Al and Tipper
-Aretha Franklin in her sweet hat. She is totally ready for church.
-Yo-Yo Ma taking a picture with his iPhone, cello at his feet
-more than 1 million people watching history
-and the Magical Floating Hat (hint: in the section behind Obama)

I'm sure there are many more faces to spot. Let me know if you find any! Enjoy!

Follow my nose

The past few days I have been smelling things a lot. "They" say that smell is strongly linked to memory, and my non-scientifically-backable anecdotal experience is piling up the support. In the past few days I have had these intense memory-triggering experiences:

1) While riding in a car with a female friend, some combination of her shampoo/deodorant/lady scents vividly connected her with feelings of an ex-girlfriend. I was crazy about that ex, and she was a fox and a half, and the girl I was with in the car is a strictly platonic friend. It made me feel things in places. I sort of suppressed the thought until I bumped into that same ex-girlfriend at a concert the very next day. I couldn't think of a gentlemanly way to say "The other day I smelled someone who smelled like you [used to smell] and I found it extremely compelling, like in an immediate sexual response way," so instead I just said "It's nice to see you!" and hoped the point got across.

2) Today while at work it was very muggy and hot outside and very air-conditioned inside, so when people opened the door the various drafts of air were quite noticeable. Again, some indefinable conspiracy of scents ignited a vivid memory of playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Arcade Game or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time in my friend Evan Pease's basement on his Nintendo (or Super Nintendo, respectively). I was transported back in time to those sleepover nights eating the snacks and playing the game console(s) my parents wouldn't buy for me. But amidst this wave of mutant-turtle memories, I was jolted back into the present need for chai lattes and double chocolate chip frappucino blended cremes. Bummer.

In both instances I was so connected with the memory that it overtook all of my senses for a moment. As far as my brain was perceiving, I was not in that car or that Starbucks in 2007, I was with a girlfriend in 2000 or in a basement with a buddy in 1996. My entire sensory experience was flushed by the olfactory cue. It was a curious sensation, not at all unenjoyable. I've often said that my sense of smell is probably my only sense worth anything (given my need for glasses, mediocre hearing, undistinguished palette, and assumably average sense of touch). It reminds me that supposedly people secrete pheromones similar to those that animals use to communicate, but we ruin them with all our bathing, deodorizing, and perfuming. I'm willing to bet that, if the pheromone idea has any truth to it, it's no surprise that these two scent memories connected to sex in the first instance and a familial feeling of safety in the second. The next time someone tells me I smell good, I'll try and find out just how good that smell makes them feel.

For further illustration: see Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Sunday Morning

Sunday mornings are a special time. My mother is at church, usually gone before I wake up. My father spends the whole morning in the basement doing work or goofing off or doing whatever it is that he does, presumably enjoying the change in routine as much as I do. I sleep as a first order of business. I work Sunday evenings, so Sunday morning is the one time I can sleep without my subconscious buzzing with the thought that maybe I’m late for work. I don’t always sleep late. In fact sometimes I’m up rather early, ready to start my (Sun)day.

I wake up on Sunday mornings and instantly try to fall back asleep. I was never able to fall back asleep until a year or two ago, and I’m still not great at it. If I can’t, I usually smile and mash my face into the pillow, enjoying the warmth and the lack of urgency. There is no “usual” time to wake up on Sundays, sometimes it’s 6:30am, sometimes it’s noon. While I am mashing my face I let a few thoughts drift through my head, and more often than not one of them sticks and I ponder that for a while. I reach my hand over the side of the bed and pad it around until I find one of two things: (1) my cell phone, or (2) the book I’m reading. If I find the cell phone first I check the time (smiling again at my lack of schedule) and see if there were any messages left for me after I fell asleep. Usually I find the book first, it is a bigger object after all, and I completely ignore the phone and its time and its messages. I turn on the light next to the bed and snuggle back into my cocoon with only the tips of my fingers exposed to hold the book. Before I can get through a page my eyes start to water and I have to wipe the tears and sleep dust away, but since no part of me wants to leave the warm womb of my bed, I just mash my face against the pillow again. Having cleared my eyes, I read the book that is balanced on its side in front of my reclining face. I don’t stop myself from dozing off in the middle of a sentence.

I stay in the warm bubble of flannel sheets and printed words for as long as I can. Usually the first thing I do in the morning is head for the bathroom to evacuate, but not on Sundays. Every step on Sunday is a sort of game where the goal is to press back against the usual morning routine. How long can I go without opening my eyes? How long can I stay in bed? How long before I have to go downstairs? To eat? To shower? To put on pants? Eventually, after maybe an hour, the need to eat or wash overtakes me. Usually it’s the need to eat, but that depends on the Saturday night that preceded the Sunday morning– notably if I ate something substantial or hung out with lots of smokers I’ll feel the needs to bathe before I need to eat. (This morning my hands smelled like plastic, which was as distracting as it was inexplicable.) Often, after eating or showering or both, I’ll go back to bed, reclaiming my cocoon, and read or sleep some more. Sometimes I’ll feel compelled to write and I reach for the pad of paper that lives under my bed. Occasionally I’ll find something scrawled on the paper already, the last remnant of Saturday night left behind before I drifted off. I’ll write whatever Sunday thoughts I’ve got going on in the form of a note-to-self journal or a letter to a friend. All the writing invariably gets shoved back under the bed into a pile of late-night and early-morning thoughts. That pile, if anyone was to read through it, tells the story of my life from the periphery of consciousness. I have not read through it. I took the pile from Cleveland back with me in a box and started a new pile here in Buffalo.

Finally Sunday morning (long-since turned in to Sunday afternoon, just not in my mind) will come to a logical close. A friend will call me and invite me to lunch, my mother will return home from post-church brunch and rouse me, or I’ll just have my fill of dozing and reading and writing and thinking. I will put on pants, which is the final step in my acceptance of a new day. The writing goes on the pile, the cell phone goes from charger to pocket, the book lays closed beside the bed. Today I looked out the window and was surprised that it was snowing, because in my Sunday morning world there is no weather, there are no seasons, there exists nothing beyond my immediate surroundings and the comfort of my mind. The snow draws me out the window into a world with weather systems, traffic patterns and even Other People. I see the cars on the street and know that the world doesn’t value Sunday mornings the way I do. I doubt they could understand the value of my lazy Sunday morning life. But Sunday morning has bolstered my constitution for another week, and I am ready to confront this world. I am wearing pants after all.

Epic tales of everyday life

I just finished (and loved) this:

You're A Prayer for Owen Meany!
by John Irving

Despite humble and perhaps literally small beginnings, you inspire faith in almost everyone you know. You are an agent of higher powers, and you manifest this fact in mysterious and loud ways. A sense of destiny pervades your every waking moment, and you prepare with great detail for destiny fulfilled. When you speak, IT SOUNDS LIKE THIS!
Take the Book Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

I could call it APFOM, if I liked awkward acronyms. And I do, so that's settled. APFOM was excellent. It's 600 pages long, but it reads like it's 200. It's a fictional memoir, told in the style of a series of stories after dinner. It bounces around a little, tells interesting background stories about all the characters and gently packs in an incredibly thick continuity. It's hilarious, touching, tragic, and ordinary. In short, it's the story of a life.

I've started to think about the books I like, the stories I like. I've realized a theme in stories like APFOM, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and Skinny Legs and All. I called them "epic adventures of everyday life." I like the idea that every life is as beautiful and worthwhile as those of the much lauded "heroes" that we love to dote on. Even Siddhartha, which is certainly a story of an extraordinary man (the man who would become known as The Buddha), centers on the revalations gained from an uncommon perspective on a fairly common life. As much as I love The Lord of the Rings or Watchmen (and I do), saving the world is pretty obviously important and interesting. It's fun to get swept up in these stories, to daydream about saving the world and having monuments named after you. But it has always left me feeling very ordinary. What would my story be, without an evil ring to unmake or even an arch nemesis to battle! Call me Dude of the Woeful Countenance. But stories like A Prayer for Owen Meany give me comfort. I cried when my grandfather died, and later when my grandmother died, and they never saved the world... at least, not obviously. But if APFOM has told me anything, it confirmed the feeling I've always felt that if you live a good life then you really are saving the world. Loving life is as miraculous as anything the "great stories" have to offer.

I submit my life to you, the ages, for consideration. Today I got up, read a silly pulp comic book, read a blog my friend published, ate some cereal, text messaged a friend, and wrote a blog entry for myself. It's been beautiful so far, don't you see? And it's still the morning!

Life is a mess, and I love it.

When arrows don't penetrate, cupid grabs a pistol!

Originally written, in a shorter and more personal form, as an email to my sister and her husband

Happy Valentine's Day dudes and dudettes! I hope you all have a nice day of romance. I have no romance going on, but I do look the part. I am wearing a nice red sweater that a wonderful girl got for me as a birthday present several years ago. As I am single, and decidedly not upset about it, I am celebrating the day with a nice dinner with a few friends. I've spent the day reading, and I'm going to finish "A Prayer for Owen Meany." I may buy Sarah Silverman's "Jesus is Magic" as a gift for myself. Straight up, this year I am my OWN valentine and let me tell you I am a sweetheart!

And now a Valentine's Day story:

---

A few days ago a regular customer at Starbucks asked my friend Brendon and me what we thought of Valentine's Day. She's the type of girl who's good looking and sort of insecure about it. We're all pretty sure she has a crush on every man she meets. Anyway, so she asked about Valentine's Day. She said something awkwardly provocative like "You guys must have girlfriends to enjoy it with, right?" When we said we didn't she quickly followed with, "But when you have had girlfriends, did you like it?" She was clearly looking for some reassurance, but we weren't sure in which direction she was leaning. We're not trying to offend, of course.

Brendon said something diplomatic by saying it's nice but not a huge deal, but she was really digging for an opinion. I had actually been thinking about it recently for other reasons. I decided to try my philosophy on a real live Female and see what happened.

"The way I see it," I began, "people get too worked up about the wrong thing. Romantic love is wonderful, and certainly deserves celebration, but what's so special about February 14th? If I take my girlfriend out to a nice dinner a week before, or a week after, or on the day, what's the difference? I say, if you want to do something romantic, do it. Don't wait for some 'special' day, make today special. If you take the position that romance is worth celebrating every day, Valentine"s Day is a great excuse to have fun and there's really no pressure. And if I don't have a girlfriend, no big deal, I'll celebrate when I get one."

That'’s seriously what I said, pretty much verbatim. It just popped out as if I'd been rehearsing it (which I hadn'’t, though I'’d been thinking about it). She was pretty surprised to get a treatise like that, so she just kind of vaguely agreed and looked like she was thinking about it. We chatted about Starbucks'’ new cupcakes that are supposed to be a Valentine'’s treat, despite having no clear connection to the day. Apparently when she encountered another coworker on her way out she announced simply: "Valentine's Day."” When he looked for some sort of follow-up she said in a similar declarative manner, "Cupcakes," and walked off.

The end.

Heart-with-an-arrow-through-it,
Jack

PhotoChicagop

The other day I promised details on my second trip to Chicago within recent memory. (You may remember some posts from another trip I took last October.) My lady has been accepted to a few law schools, and this past weekend we went out to see what the Chicago-Kent School of Law had to offer that might draw her away from the higher-ranked Ohio State University Moritz College of Law (besides a better name and more attractive webpage). Her dad is one of those "travelling all-of-the-times businessmen" and he cashed in a few frequent flyer miles and hotel points, so I was lucky enough to tag along for free! Friday we walked around in Chicago, geting a famous deep-dish pizza before visiting Millennium Park and State Street. After a nice wine and cheese reception at the school we took a tip from another prospy and went to a fancy bar in the Signature Room in the John Hancock Building (a very tall and famous non-Sears Tower building). I guess the observation deck on the 94th floor costs about $10, but one floor up that $10 will get you the same view AND a really fancy drink. This is a blurry cell phone-camera picture of the view at night, showing the "Magnificent Mile" near the center and the spires of the Sears Tower far above the city towards the right. Click to make it bigger:



While Laura was busy doing law school stuff on Saturday, I went to the amazing Shedd Aquarium. Seriously, it was just about the coolest. Probably the #1 thing I'd recommend to any Chicago visitor (or native, for that matter). We met back up and went to the Sears Tower, which was as amazing as it was in October. It was a clear day so the visibility was about 30 miles. Wow. I took more pictures with my smell phone and made this using my very limited Photoshop abilities. (Again, click to see it full size):



I finished off the experience with an overpriced "Chicago-style" hotdog in the airport, and about 36 hours after we had left we were home. Next ChicaGoal: Experience Chicago in the summer when maybe the wind won't freeze your skin.