Brain Drain

BRAIN EXERCISES CAN ACCELERATE MENTAL DECLINE

Read the above sentence quickly without at least scanning the full article and you might decide just to let your brain lay fallow for a few years to extend its awareness. My gosh! Using and exercising the brain will accelerate its journey to uselessness. Makes sense. That's what happens to all the vehicles I've owned. One minute they're glistening clean with an aromatic new car aroma and a scant few years later broken down, rusted and awaiting the final hook up ride to the wreckers. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time whatever lurks in my cranial cavity feels fine, just that last drink once in a while gives it a dull, achy, throbbing presence almost impossible to escape.  Once I buckled down to reading the article with focused attention I realized the acceleration can be confined to the far end so as to speak.

Let's assume one day in the future - say twenty years to the day - my brain will lose complete touch with the outside world, sort of like a door closing shut for the last time. So if I choose: to loll lazily on the couch munching goodies staring at the copious quantities of inane programming emanating from the LCD screen, to never visit the library or pick up a newspaper, to scream for the calculator to add up 2 digit numbers and over, and to abstain from all conversations requiring complete thoughts or logic; then I can expect the door to begin moving towards the locked position in about ten years, give or take a few days, as I commence a decade long process to obscurity. However, getting at the crosswords, Sudoku, reading and engaging in stimulating discussions would appear to delay for a number of years - be generous and say seven - the ability of the door to start swinging shut. Now the period of decline has been reduced to only three years even though the final closing remains the same. Obviously the next step is an attempt to shorten the withering away period even more. Best case scenario would be to have the door untouched and resting comfortably until that specific morning twenty years in the future when I could gracefully orate my goodbyes and final thoughts to the assembled crowds just in advance of the final slamming. Therefore, time to remove the sawdust and cotton batten holding my neurons in place and reason out just how many crosswords I have to complete to hit the twenty year mark unscathed!