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Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Having seen that article about Agatha Christie's dementia and how it showed in her writing as simpler sentence structures, less vocabulary, and more vague constructions over time, I now find myuself correcting what I write to have more variety in construction, more precise words, and less common words. While fighting against sounding pretentious.
It really seems like most forms of dementia are due to things largely beyond our control. But we do have some influence over aspects of mental decay. A brain that is constantly exercised and challenged is at least a bit less vulnerable: this is not superstition, anyway. Synapses are pruned when they aren't used, and an abundance of functioning synapses means that there are some lying around for re-routing when others are destroyed.
You know how Terry Pratchett told people not to mourn his mind prematurely? I think he's counting on drugs and behavior for making it to the end of his lifespan with enough wits to keep going, to keep creative. And it's a decent gamble (not to mentio it's the only game in town: if you decide not to play, you lose). One of Agatha Christie's latest books was an outlier in the study because she undertook a new genre of writing and had to do a lot of research for it, resulting in a lot of freshly-learned vocabulary and probably a lot of notes to write from.
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Having seen that article about Agatha Christie's dementia and how it showed in her writing as simpler sentence structures, less vocabulary, and more vague constructions over time, I now find myuself correcting what I write to have more variety in construction, more precise words, and less common words. While fighting against sounding pretentious.
It really seems like most forms of dementia are due to things largely beyond our control. But we do have some influence over aspects of mental decay. A brain that is constantly exercised and challenged is at least a bit less vulnerable: this is not superstition, anyway. Synapses are pruned when they aren't used, and an abundance of functioning synapses means that there are some lying around for re-routing when others are destroyed.
You know how Terry Pratchett told people not to mourn his mind prematurely? I think he's counting on drugs and behavior for making it to the end of his lifespan with enough wits to keep going, to keep creative. And it's a decent gamble (not to mentio it's the only game in town: if you decide not to play, you lose). One of Agatha Christie's latest books was an outlier in the study because she undertook a new genre of writing and had to do a lot of research for it, resulting in a lot of freshly-learned vocabulary and probably a lot of notes to write from.
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