Dylan Thomas was right about one thing, at least

[ritaxis]

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.

Comments

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

>>A brain that is constantly exercised and challenged is at least a bit less vulnerable: this is not superstition, anyway.<<

I've seen this too many times to think it's a superstition. My uncle, Phil Farmer, was a great example of this. His writing only took anything resembling a downward slide when problems with his back and eyes knocked him down to writing only one hour a day instead of eight. Later he suffered a series of mini-strokes, but even after the first couple he was still sharp and could hold relatively long discussions with you about most any topic you wanted.

[cynthia1960.livejournal.com]

I noticed the same thing with Barbara Cartland's romances over the years. During the last few years when she was published in the US, the sentences and paragraphs got much shorter (one sentence paragraphs!). I was attributing it to having to dictate the books, but it could have been dementia.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

It could have been, and if she fought it off long enough to die of something else, you'd never really know.

[pameladean]

I've read this of Iris Murdoch, too, that the language of her last novel shows the progression of her Alzheimer's.

I breathe a sigh of relief every time I come up with the kind of sentence that was once dubbed "a Pamela" by the Scribblies. Even though I have to chop them up or rearrange their various parts, as a rule, after writing them. I also read somewhere that if you want to keep your brain flexible, you should do things with your non-dominant hand, if you have one. This tends to trip me up a lot, but I am doing it, and have developed an odd habit of writing words and phrases on my jeans or on chair arms with my left index finger. No idea if this actually helps, but my left-handed handwriting has improved significantly.

P.

[redbird]

This suggests that my mousing left-landed (which I do to spare the right shoulder) and using a fork with that hand (which I grew up doing, for no particular reason) may be doing my brain some good as well. Thanks.

[pameladean]

Yes, I mouse with my left hand, too, until that shoulder complains, and then I switch to the right hand until THAT shoulder complains. Sometimes it takes months for anything to get annoyed, sometimes weeks. I only hope I may not one day wish for three hands.

I can try to look up the source of the advice to use one's non-dominant hand. It does make sense, but of course not everything that seems to make sense actually does. I'm pretty sure it won't do any harm, though.

P.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I do the alternating mouse hands thing too and for the same reason. It's nice to know that it might help my brain as well as my shoulders.

Otherwise, according to research done at Bangor university and elsewhere, speaking more than one language helps. It's also possible that playing a musical instrument helps too.