Jane Brody looks at old brains today in the New York Times - a new take on good old "use it or lose it". Sweet.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
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Elderbloggers. Our histories. Our stories. Our pasts, presents and futures. Aging. Growing. Maturing. Immaturing. Art. Poetry. Photography. Feminism. Senior Moments. Junior Moments. Life Matters. Grey Matters. All matters. As I put my toe tentatively in the blog pond I invite others to swim, wade, paddle, sputter and splash with me. In my experience, the water’s warmer that way.
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The young person yawns as the old lady drones on and on about her past. How much of who we are is our history? How does the seven-year-old girl live on in the 57-year-old woman? How do our experiences, our lives lived, matter?
When I got my degree in Biology over thirty years ago, quarks and neutrinos were new, wild concepts. The atom still tried to loom large as the smallest particle around. Electron microscopes revealed blurry pictures of things once only imagined. Hand-held calculators were just arriving on the scene. The student that knew how to use one had an edge over the rest of us with our slide rules. I’d like to go on, wallowing in my memories of the beauty of differential equations; of the thrill of studying organic chemistry and reading the small print on bottles in the drug store and being able to identify the compounds; of growing all kinds of stuff from my house in microbiology. One semester I built cages and filled the center of the biology lab with a dozen chickens. I was going to make low cholesterol eggs. Other students were doing their projects with mice and rats. I didn’t actually do anything to my chickens but wrote my research paper speculating on what would have happened had I fed them some clever concoction of food. At the end of the semester I took them home and put them in a lovely coop I built for them using scrap lumber from around my yard.
I have lots of stories about my chickens. Those were the days. Yawn. The old lady reminisces.
Remembering Matters.
When I got my degree in Biology over thirty years ago, quarks and neutrinos were new, wild concepts. The atom still tried to loom large as the smallest particle around. Electron microscopes revealed blurry pictures of things once only imagined. Hand-held calculators were just arriving on the scene. The student that knew how to use one had an edge over the rest of us with our slide rules. I’d like to go on, wallowing in my memories of the beauty of differential equations; of the thrill of studying organic chemistry and reading the small print on bottles in the drug store and being able to identify the compounds; of growing all kinds of stuff from my house in microbiology. One semester I built cages and filled the center of the biology lab with a dozen chickens. I was going to make low cholesterol eggs. Other students were doing their projects with mice and rats. I didn’t actually do anything to my chickens but wrote my research paper speculating on what would have happened had I fed them some clever concoction of food. At the end of the semester I took them home and put them in a lovely coop I built for them using scrap lumber from around my yard.
I have lots of stories about my chickens. Those were the days. Yawn. The old lady reminisces.
Remembering Matters.
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