Another insight into the brain
Traumatic brain injury rightfully captures much media attention at the moment, courtesy, in part, of the struggles of service personnel and military veterans. The New York Times today (August 9, 2009) covers this interesting and important topic on the front page in an article, Brain Power: After Injury, Fighting to Regain a Sense of Self. The insights gained as people, often young, strive to force the brain to learn anew offers an amazing story but also a lesson in the dynamic possibilities of the brain. And while it is important to emphasize that these possibilities are life-long, this quotation resonates with me:
“The brain is ‘plastic,’ recent research suggests; intact areas can recruit nearby, healthy brain tissue to bypass damage and compensate for lost function.
It does not seem to happen, however, without effort; to reroute signal traffic down back channels, the brain needs traffic, scientists say. It needs to be active, solving problems, meeting social expectations.”
This is brain fitness in another guise! This is one of the main points to active, successful, healthy, and creative aging! The author goes on:
“In studies of dementia, researchers have found that some people who are lucid until a very old age have brains that appear riddled with Alzheimer’s disease. Many of them remain social to the end, engaged in regular card games or debates with friends who make mental demands of them.”
This is it! This is the power of “enriched environments”, to borrow a phrase from the Living Well with Memory Loss conference I attended last week.
An obvious point
The columnist Thomas Sowell writes today “the point is that health care is largely in your hands. Medical care is the hands of doctors.”
Good point and now the obvious question: how does that relate to aging? How can we talk about caring about our own aging?
Summer Reading
I can’t pretend to read only books about aging but I do confess that my reading tastes include fiction that provides insight into the experience of people who are aging. A recent find is Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. It came highly recommended; I borrowed from the library of a reader whose taste were eclectic and refined. I found it engrossing. And not just the story of a young man in the Depression-era travelling circus; the old man yearning to be freed from his family and circumstances (the nursing home). If one purpose of reading is being taken places you’ve never been (but recognize when you arrive) then Gruen is a good guide both to the drama of the circus and the backwater of boredom that all too often must be the province of our seniors. Try it yourself!
Summer Blockbusters, Creative Aging style
I’m not a fan of most blockbuster movies but somehow summer and movies are inexorably linked in my mind. Beach books too (but I’ll save that for another post!). And so movies were already on my mind when recently several caught my attention.
The first was a few weeks ago in the Washington, D.C. area as I came across the American Film Insitute’s festival, SilverDocs. Three movies were singled out as being particularly worthy of attention in reviews and all three were about the experience of aging! How lucky can we be. As one review was titled : Close-up On the Elderly.
The next reminder about movies and aging in a e-mail when someone I know admitted seeing Away From Her over the weekend. Entertainment can simply be that, entertaining but it is special when entertainment can teach as well as amuse or titillate. Away From Her is just such.
Another recent tap was in my local paper with a notice about a graduate student at a local university whose made a personal story into documentary on living with Alzheimer’s Disease and front lobal dementia. Dear Dad I haven’t been able to see but it is gaining local (and or regional) acclaim. Let’s hope it gets shown nearby, and soon!
“We Grieve Too”
“We grieve too” said the profesional from the Alzheimer’s Association (to the professional from Hospice). How true. We grieve at a loss because we have allowed ourselves to feel, to be humanly engaged with another. Aging, creative or otherwise, can mean walling ourselves off from feeling, so we feel no loss but then we lose so much.
It’s the work
Recently I attended a meeting in which the presenter said (and I paraphrase) the best thing is to keep the work, the purpose, in the center of everything you do. It was one of those ”ah-ha” moment…I work hard to keep creativity and aging at the center of what I do…yet maybe I do that to the exclusion of reflecting and sharing it. Maybe returning to this blog after such a period of silence can bring me back to a better balance. Because balance is best.
The important question
The neatly dressed woman stood quietly, waiting patiently, until almost all the other glad-handers had gone. I’d just finished a breezily-entertaining (and I hope enlightening) presentation on brain fitness and we all had enjoyed ourselves. She approached and I turned. She asked the important question: “How do we get people to try?” Try painting, she said, because painting was the greatest mental challenge she’d ever had and ever enjoyed. But if we can’t get people to try then they’ll never be able to succeed.
Great question. And I have valid fragments of an answer but no truth. How do we get people to try? Try something new. Try something challenging. Try something hard. How?
Maybe we have it all wrong!
Maybe we do have it all wrong. Recently I had an experience that reminded me that those basic concepts of human psychology matter. I was travelling and had to board a bus…but the bus loaded and unloaded only from one end. Therefore the first to get on had to move to the back in order to allow the other passengers on and were the last off. Savvy travellers crowded near the door and the driver resorted to yelling “We aren’t going anywhere until every passenger gets on this bus, so move back!”. But in this case obeying the rules, the driver, meant the first became last and the last (or those who lingered by the door) first. So the incentive to do the right thing was lacking. And people act according to incentives and personal gain. That’s the pyschological principle I was referring to. And how does this apply to creative aging? Well since none of us want to get old, we most often avoid the subject. Perhaps if we had named this movement “Creative Living Life to Its Fullest” we’d be more successful. People want to live life to its fullest.
Road Trip!
Tomorrow we travel to Washington, D. C. to attend the Open House for the National Center for Creative Aging (NCCA). The special guests are impressive: Dr. Gene Cohen, Maria Genne, Anthony Hyatt, and Stuart Kandell. There will be storytelling, drama, music, poetry and visuals to celebrate the new home of the NCCA. The Center will be partnering with the George Washington University’s Center on Aging, Health & Humanities. Dr. Jean Johnson, senior associate dean for GW’s School of Medicine and Health Sciences said “This is one of the most exciting partnerships. [It] will impact how we teach and think about aging, reaching beyond the GW Medical Center and extending to the national and global communities.”
This is exciting for us because we are the creative aging network for North Carolina! Our communities will benefit from the development of programs based on the research results coming from this partnership. We’ll let you know how the trip goes and what we learn!
To learn more about the Center for Creative Aging-North Carolina (CCA-NC) go to www.cca-nc.org and check us out!
We want to hear from you!
Myths About Age, Art and Genius?
David Galenson writes that “many innovations spring not from their creators’ innate talent, but from their years of accumulated knowledge” (in “5 Myths about Art, Age and Genius”). That makes Galenson an advocate of creative aging in many ways since he contrasts, favorably I might add, the work of young geniuses and old masters. It seems he is thinking along the lines of Gene Cohen and his definition of creativity:
Creative Expression=(Mass of Knowledge)(Internal Life Experience*External Life Experience)
And for those of us who don’t remember algebra, Cohen explains:
When we look at all the elements and influences regarding creativity, what seems to matter most are sufficient knowledge or mastery of an area; motivation and perspiration or the willingness to do; some intangible that are part of the human condition, such as intuition and insight; and the capacity to be inspired (The Creative Age, page 38).
So Galenson’s comment “keep that in mind when you head to an art museum” may be true in even more ways than he knows.
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