i have wondered, since visiting an elderly acquaintance recently, why it is that many older people so often speak in platitudes. walter was a gem... my heart is so light! ... god is good.
from an academic standpoint, i'm interested in the neuroscience work of longcamp, klein & boals, and even david snowdon, whose nun study traced the cognitive declines of a group of convent sisters in the midwest.
snowdon and others have found relationships between intelligence and the eventual onset of dementia or alzheimer's. more specifically, correlations have been found between ew and overall brain function. what's interesting about this work is, of course, the cerebral stuff. writing is hard! but longcamp specifically pointed toward the motor components of the writing process as being of paramount importance.
ah, speaking of platitudes!
why, then, would a dementia-addled brain resort to quick, almost automatic keystrokes (if you will) of speech? is it so simple an answer that more in-depth processing is no longer available?
no... what i'm trying to grasp at here is not involved in overall cognitive processing. i'm concerned with verbal and written ability.
but these quick verbal keystrokes are interesting. as the mind regresses, it resorts to that with which it is most familiar. in other words, memories, phraseology, even...words!... that it has longest known and thus grown most familiar with. here, we come to the all too common occurence whereby senior citizens, widowed by their respective partners, rediscover a high-school sweetheart.
what is love?
from an academic standpoint, i'm interested in the neuroscience work of longcamp, klein & boals, and even david snowdon, whose nun study traced the cognitive declines of a group of convent sisters in the midwest.
snowdon and others have found relationships between intelligence and the eventual onset of dementia or alzheimer's. more specifically, correlations have been found between ew and overall brain function. what's interesting about this work is, of course, the cerebral stuff. writing is hard! but longcamp specifically pointed toward the motor components of the writing process as being of paramount importance.
ah, speaking of platitudes!
why, then, would a dementia-addled brain resort to quick, almost automatic keystrokes (if you will) of speech? is it so simple an answer that more in-depth processing is no longer available?
no... what i'm trying to grasp at here is not involved in overall cognitive processing. i'm concerned with verbal and written ability.
but these quick verbal keystrokes are interesting. as the mind regresses, it resorts to that with which it is most familiar. in other words, memories, phraseology, even...words!... that it has longest known and thus grown most familiar with. here, we come to the all too common occurence whereby senior citizens, widowed by their respective partners, rediscover a high-school sweetheart.
what is love?
is it as unique and passionate as we make it? or does the mind simply prefer the comfort of an 'old shoe' in later years?
what are we, the conduits of it?
under the auspices of love do we stockpile all our past favorable impressions--whereby nowadays, it is recalled that high-school was 'all about walter.'shorthand verbal keystrokes, the tritisms uttered by many in advanced years implies much about the relationship between language and emotion. we know that snowdon explored this in the nun study, in terms of positive versus negative emotion, but what of platitudes--which seem like 'shorthand' for genuine experience?
does dementia cut down on our emotive pathways? is there an emtotion that one may experience which is not totally reliant on the interconnectedness of language and memory? in other words, many may spend their time matching up current happenings against patterns of past happenings, and using that to decide whether or not they are happy. is there an emotion you can experience which may not be put into words? guh guh guh...
