Ageing, maturity, wisdom and vulnerability.
I read, here on Medium, an excellent article that linked wisdom to age. I’m not remembering the title and author; I will not try to remember, and you will understand the reason in this same text.
There, I left a comment that said something like this:
“Advanced age can lead a person to wisdom, if he has paid attention to all the relevant or interesting events in his life, the people related to them, the environments and situations of these moments and all the important moments of his surroundings, his country, of what was happening in the world; we all had successes (easily remembered) and setbacks, problems and losses, and people around us too. These memories and lived learning, yes, can lead you to wisdom, and to use it for yourself and others; will really be a sage.
This does not presuppose formal education, but unless you have had a protected childhood and loving care, you have been able to eat a reasonable amount of healthy food, and protein to have developed a normal and healthy brain.
I know, and certainly you too, many illiterate people or people with only precarious schooling of admirable wisdom.
Human beings abandoned by the family, or that run away from the family due to beatings, out of fear, live on the streets, and become wise and important exist: they are people of exemplary self-esteem, incredible tenacity, heroes not always known through the media. They are, of course, the exception; everyone else can become a “smartass”, “clever dude”, thieves and fascinators.
I also wrote that old age also leads to naivety.
In the research I did, I only saw answers to the contrary; however, in my view, the experiments are flawed; the examples of scams that old people often fall into are factual proof of this. They are prime targets for rogues and criminals.
I believe that intrinsic goodness, carried by DNA or acquired since childhood, leads to this. Compassion obscures reality, they believe the sad stories that the poor thing tells…
Myself, before I was 60 years old, I fell into one and, to help the rascal who told a sad story, who had a reasonable accumulation of real facts, I created a huge problem with my Bank: the bastard created a Bank account in one in which I have had an account that was already cancelled and forged a transaction in which I would have stolen a deposit from him at that Bank.
And I fell into two more.
Old age or not, I’m naive.
And I suffer from “l’esprit de l’escalier (“mind of the staircase”). I don’t know how to defend myself against out-of-context questions and verbal attacks. I am dumbfounded, mute, speechless, hurt; only later do I see what I should have answered; it’s no use anymore, there’s the pain, the shame, which are hard to erase.
Worse is when this happens with friends!
The best friend I ever had was Daniel Marun, friend-father-brother, always attentive, always a counsellor, always ready to help me physically, emotionally, in money.
When COFAVI went bankrupt, I went into a deep depression. He would see me, every day, in the cubicle borrowed by another friend: two small rooms, the one at the entrance where were my secretary who came to help me, free of charge, and the old computer, open to mine, where my desk almost didn’t fit and two chairs next to it. If I regretted something, he would, with all affection, give me a psychoanalysis session like “Analista de Bagé”; a knee kick. It only made my dismay worse, seeing that he didn’t know what it was; he never had depression. Treated by medical practitioners, I took five to six strong tranquillizer pills a day. I was cured by a psychiatrist long-time friend of international fame who, upon learning of my situation, summoned me immediately to his office, which was four blocks from the cubicle. He gave me a bunch of free samples of Efexor 75mg, starting two a day, after two months one a day. He cured me in six months; It was hard to remove the tranquillizer: I had to reduce it, cutting little pieces, until I got rid of it in four months.
Our friendship remained as always, he continued to take care of me; and when I made a new and catastrophic mistake, he became my “démerdeur”.
More recently, another dear friend, to whom I owe a lot, a friend of enormous kindness, that could not put himself in my skin, in my reality at the moment we were talking on the phone. He must have been very stressed by other problems, or even and most probably by my constant messages asking him to do the impossible; he gave me an answer to which, again, I could not answer. I know he is helping me as always and will continue to help me, but the shame persists; it will disappear, of course.
As for memory problems in old age, I received a message quoting an eminent scientist who said, “If you remember that you have forgotten a word, your memory is good,” and the reasoning. Unfortunately, I blacked it out.
Here are the documents I read:
1 — Ageing memories may not be worse, just different, a new study suggests.
“Reagh looked at a “naturalistic approach,” one that more closely resembled real-world activities. He found that brain activity in older adults isn’t necessarily quieter when it comes to memory. “It’s just different,” he says.
2 — Ageing and the brain https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2596698/#:~:text=The%20brain%20shrinks%20with%20increasing,levels%20of%20neurotransmitters%20and% 20 hormones.
Which, luckily, has nothing to do with me and problems that give rise to serious neurological diseases and can even cause death.
3 — How the Aging Brain Affects Thinking:
Of what I highlight:
“Aging may also bring positive cognitive changes. For example, many studies have shown that older adults have more extensive vocabularies and greater knowledge of the depth of meaning of words than younger adults. Older adults may also have learned from a lifetime of accumulated knowledge and experiences. Whether and how older adults apply this accumulated knowledge and result in how the brain changes, is an area of active exploration by researchers.
Despite the changes in cognition that may come with age, older adults can still do many of the things they have enjoyed their whole lives. Research shows that older adults can still:
• Learn new skills
• Form new memories
• Improve vocabulary and language skills”.
4 — Changes That Occur to the Aging Brain: What Happens When We Get Older:
“in addition to our bodies changing as they grow older, our brains are also constantly transforming throughout our lives — and it’s not as simple as you might think. Some functions like memory, processing speed, and spatial awareness deteriorate as we age, but other skills like verbal abilities and abstract reasoning actually improve”
The below assumptions:
“due to decreasing synaptic connections”.
“As the brain ages, neurons also begin to die”.
Are commented on item 6.
5 — Why Do We Get Tip-of-the-Tongue Syndrome? — — What you shall not do — What you can do.
“Frustratingly, the more we think about the missing word, as we are inclined to do, the more it eludes us. But struggling with it only to be given the answer by the Internet actually doesn’t do us much good in helping us recall the word later. In fact, Humphrey’s research suggests it basically ensures you’ll forget it again”.
And:
“Our results support the idea that making errors tend to reinforce those errors, making them more likely to reoccur,” the authors write. In other words, every time you forget Liam Neeson’s name and resort to looking it up on IMDB, you’re reinforcing your mistake, digging the mental groove of forgetfulness even deeper.
“If you keep going down that pathway, it digs that path a little bit more you’re a little bit more likely to fall into that same rut later,” Humphreys says”.
What will normally help:
“The good news is that the new studies offer a potential solution. Humphreys found that when participants managed to remember the word they were struggling with on their own, instead of just being told the answer, they were less likely to forget the word on the next test. And when volunteers were given a phonological clue, like the first few letters of the word, they were almost as likely to remember the word later as if they’d figured it out on their own.
I use this doing crossword puzzles: If I don’t remember one, I try out the first letter following the vocabulary, from a to z. There’s always a hit on the first letter, and I usually remember the word; if I still can’t decipher it, I do the same with the second letter: Bingo!
6 -Memory Problems That Shouldn’t Worry You:https://www.nextavenue.org/6-memory-problems-shouldnt-worry-you/
“Absent-mindedness. This type of forgetting occurs when you don’t pay close enough attention to what you are doing or hearing; for example, misplacing your glasses or car keys. Because you were thinking about something else, your brain didn’t encode the information securely. Absent-mindedness also forgetting to do something at a prescribed time, like keeping an appointment involved.
bias. One enduring myth about memory is that it records what you perceive and experience with complete, objective accuracy. In reality, your perceptions are filtered and influenced by personal biases — your experiences, beliefs, prior knowledge and even your mood at the moment — both when a memory is being encoded in the brain and when it is being retrieved”.
This predates new studies of stem cell characteristics; see two examples:
1 — Therapeutic Plasticity of Neural Stem Cells
2 — Neurorepair and Regeneration of the Brain: A Decade of Bioscaffolds and Engineered Microtissue
There are articles and so-called scientific studies (perhaps they are) for and against coffee; choose what you like. I drink the equivalent of 20 to 30 Italian coffees a day.
And, of course, there’s the same thing about drinking alcohol; one of these studies (which exists, but I missed it) says that moderate consumption, two to three glasses of wine a day, increases circulation in the bone marrow and improves the properties of the brain, especially in elderly people.
Well, I translated, three wine glasses into three shots of scotch, after dinner, sipped slowly from eleven PM to two or three wee hours.
And, applying what I wrote in “Clean and renew each of your organs”, I take the opportunity to inhale the delicious aroma of scotch, clean the brain and create new neurons and synapses.
I hope that I have managed to write in an understandably way and that I have also made the results of my research and my comments understandable.
I welcome your comments, if you want to comment, and your criticisms that will be very welcome.
“Medium” hugs.