Fight plaque

Woke a little after five. My brain decided this was an excellent idea and committed to it. The rest of me is generally questioning my brain's wisdom and leadership. Anyway, bacon is on the griddle which should help.
I heard an interview on the radio about the following study: Early life linguistic ability, late life cognitive function, and neuropathology: findings from the Nun Study. Their conclusions were that if you are able to knit together a number of separate ideas into one narrative within your sentences, you are substantially less likely to suffer dementia and Alzheimer's disease when you're old. Whether this is an evidential property or a causative one I don't know. As someone who is profoundly terrified of losing his cognitive function as he ages, however, it seemed worth consideration.
As I write I hear my sentence unfolding within my mind, as if it were being dictated to me by myself. Generally I don't know the ending of each individual line until it is reached on the page. I'm not sure what the experience of others is, but neither am I convinced that it matters too much. The important take-away is that I want to decrease my use of generalisms like "thing". Such undefined vagueries are the mark of a lazy mind, and I want all of myself to be working hard

From Radiolab:
"Researchers would visit once a year to administer memory tests, and it was during one of these visits that Snowdon made a fortuitous discovery: He was told of a collection of biographies that the sisters were required to write upon entering the order, in many cases more than 50 years before the study started. "It was a major, major find," says Serguei Pakhomov, a current researcher with the study.
Snowdon and his team evaluated the essays based on grammatical complexity and idea density – the average number of discrete ideas contained in every 10 written words.

Here's an example of a sentence packed with ideas, from the one of the sister's diaries:

"It was about a half hour before midnight between February 28 and 29 of the leap year 1912 when I began to live, and to die, as the third child of my mother, whose maiden name is Hilda Hoffman, and my father, Otto Schmidt..."

And here's an example of less idea-rich sentence:

"I was born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin on May 24, 1913, and was baptized in St. James Church..."

Snowdon discovered that sisters who scored poorly on these two measures — like the second example — were much more likely to develop dementia. Sisters within the lower third of the sample with respect to idea density, for example, were 60 times more likely to develop Alzheimer's than a sister in the upper third. In fact, using the essays, the researchers could predict with 92 percent accuracy whether the brain of a particular sister, investigated after their death, would contain the plaques and lesions in the brain that are associated with Alzheimer's Disease."

The mind at rest tends to stay at rest, I suppose. This sort of basic intuition is probably why I like to play word games and make improvised sentences. Scrabble and challenge-speed-scrabble and 1000 Blank White Cards all sharpen this knife that I use to carve the world into consumable portions. If that blade ever dulls, the process will cease; in a very real way it will prevent my consumption of consciousness.

- J