Grandma’s Brain

Yes, I know my mind is a fickle little bee doting on a thousand thoughts, but I’m getting better at chasing my mind back to the moment. Traci Brimhall. This Beautiful Confusion.

For most of my life, I had assumed that I was pretty much neurotypical, but a young friend recently questioned me on this assumption, and I had to agree that he had a point. Now, at the start of my 8^th decade, I have also become more curious about whether uncommon brains might age differently than neurotypical brains? How are our strengths and weaknesses revealed in age-related cognitive tests? Is there anything that I should consider changing in either my expectations of life going forward or in how I live in the moment?

For several months last year, my husband and I kept losing the word for nectarine. Why was that word so elusive? Or was it not the word itself, but that once a word is lost, then it becomes harder to re-find? This elderly kind of forgetting - creeping aphasia - sounds like a weed. So how does this slowly invasive weed impact on my usual non-neurotypical approach to research and writing? How does it impact on what I am still good for?

About a decade ago, I passed out while driving (thank you vasovagal syncope) and later uploaded a piece about the experience (Crash test Dummy). There were two upsides to the aftermath of this event. One was that the only lasting damage was to the car (and a few bushes). The second was that a scan of my brain revealed that I had an age-appropriate brain. I loved that label. The image of my brain revealed the presence of dozens of small white specks. They looked like snowflakes – as if they had landed at the start of a light flurry.

No doubt, there have been more flurries since then, but in spite of this there is some research which hints that there may be some upsides to living with an aging brain.

As your brain matures, it actually gets better at many important things. One of the biggest strengths that comes with age is the ability to recognize patterns. With years of experience to draw from, decision-making often improves, especially in real-life situations that require careful thought. You also tend to get better at managing your emotions, and problem-solving becomes more effective because you’ve faced and learned from a wide range of challenges. Your knowledge and use of language also continue to grow. Even if you occasionally struggle to find the right word, your overall language skills stay strong. In fact, your vocabulary usually keeps expanding well into your 70s, and your general knowledge increases over time. Many people also find that their storytelling skills improve—they become better at sharing ideas and experiences in ways that are thoughtful, clear, and meaningful. These strengths are a natural part of the brain’s evolution and a reminder that aging brings valuable mental abilities. Your Amazing Aging Brain: How It Changes and Thrives Over Time. Dr. Susan Borgaro, Clinical Neuropsychologist

My lifetime of being not too shabby at pattern recognition - and also of thinking outside the box - were both key to my being able to cobble together some bits of Irish history in my post: Seeking Ensign Jackson, although it wasn’t easy for me to find the flow. My creeping aphasia meant that I had to keep looking things up – not once, not twice, but again and again. Certain names kept slipping away with the same regularity as nectarine.  It took me forever, and made me ask myself: why do I keep doing this? Then, I came across a quote which I had written at the opening page of my 2021 diary:

I wonder what writing is or can be. There is a prophetic or mysterious quality to it sometimes – when you are on the brink of something, and even before that, when you are attracted to a subject. It is a kind of magic …. It is an odd sensation, when on the trail of research, to also feel that the research has, in a feeling that cannot be fully articulated, been on the trail of you." The Ghost Orchard. Helen Humphreys.

Am I tracking a thought, or is a thought tracking me? Or do both happen simultaneously? It has always been true that when I am in the early stages of having a thought that it begins in a totally wordless form. Do such pre-thoughts begin in the so-called lizard brain? Or in the pre-frontal cortex? Elsewhere?  Everywhere?  

 In Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst, the neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky opens with a chapter called The Behaviour, followed by the 2^nd chapter One second before, and then in subsequent chapters he tracks the hours before, then the days before, and then Back to the Crib, Back to the Womb and so on. He also explores how little control we have over where our thoughts take us.

Essay on Adam  Robert Bringhurst There are five possibilities. One: Adam fell. Two: he was pushed. Three: he jumped. Four: he only looked over the edge, and one look silenced him. Five: nothing worth mentioning happened to Adam. The first, that he fell, is too simple. The fourth, fear, we have tried and found useless. The fifth, nothing happened, is dull. The choice is between: he jumped or was pushed. And the difference between these is only an issue of whether the demons work from the inside out or from the outside in: the one theological question. From Selected Poems by Robert Bringhurst. Copyright © 2012 by Robert Bringhurst. Reprinted with permission of Copper Canyon Press. All rights reserved.

Thinking is akin to an autonomic function. Like breathing, it keeps chugging along, with or without words, whether we are paying attention or not and whether we act or not. My own pre-thought moments - when I am conscious of them - feel as if they originate in that spot just behind my forehead. Perhaps this is a common experience. Perhaps this gave rise to the myth of how Zeus gave birth to Athena.

The "forehead of Zeus" is famously associated with the birth of the goddess Athena, who sprang from it fully grown and in full armor. After Zeus swallowed his first wife, Metis (the goddess of wisdom), he suffered a terrible headache. Hephaestus split Zeus's head with an axe, and Athena emerged, representing wisdom, strategy, and defensive warfare. AI Overview.

In order to take the next step - towards wording a thought - I am often drawn to locate a particular text.  It is always my body, not my mind, which will know which shelf of books will hold the key to my thought, which book it will be in, and it is my fingers – again not my mind - that know how far to flip in from the last page. I always start at the back of a book, never the front – why? – I don’t know, but once I get to the right page, I always know exactly where the needed words will be. It is then that my non-verbal thought can begin to take shape. In words.

A couple of years ago, when Robert Bringhurst and his partner Jan Zwicky were visiting, I told them both about this, and Jan laughed out loud. Apparently, her brain also worked like that. More recently, after hearing Dennis Lee speaking in Vancouver, and then after rereading his latest book, Wrestling With Cadence: essays on writing and intuition, I came to suspect that so-called non-neurotypical thinking is perhaps not so uncommon. Lee’s own version of his pre-thinking experiences connect him to jazz, so it makes sense that he named them cadence.

We don’t have a word in English for “an array of blurts & squirts of non-verbal energy that take you over but they can’t be seen or heard by anyone else.” But I had to call the fool thing something. So I hijacked the closest term I could think of – “cadence.” There was nothing sacrosanct about the word, though; I could have called it Fred. p 18

Fred? That made me laugh. A few years ago, when my husband was dealing with recurrences of a tumour in his head (thankfully now long gone), we always referred to it as Fred in the Head. There is something about being able to name things that crystallizes thought. So, cadence it is.

Lee also described how the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam experienced the first stirring of his poems as a hum. His widow, Nadezhda Mandelstam, described this and she believed that this was a not uncommon approach for poets:

As many poets have said – Akhmatova (in “Poem Without a Hero”) and M, among them – a poem begins with a musical phrase ringing incessantly in the ears; at first inchoate, it later takes on a poetic form, though still without words. I sometimes saw M. trying to get rid of this kind of “hum”, to brush it off and escape from it. He would toss his head as though it could be shaken out like a drop of water that gets into your ear while bathing.

But it is not only poets who begin their thoughts like this. The famous physicist Richard Feynman, would writhe on the floor on the floor and emit loud howls and whoops when he was in his pre-verbal thinking. For him, there was a visual element to this:

What I am really trying to do is bring birth to clarity, which is really a half-assedly thought-out pictorial semi-vision thing. … its all visual. It’s hard to explain.

As Lee points out, it is not insignificant that: Some of the seminal advances of modern physics were made during these painstaking joyrides in the intuitive field (p. 21).

As I follow my own joyrides in the intuitive field, the digital age has introduced two new conundrums. What is the starting point for a preverbal digital search? Also, what about community? Thoughts can only progress so far when we think in isolation. We all benefit when we have to work together with those who hold tenaciously opposing views - what is called adversarial collaboration. Engaging with those who would advocate competing hypotheses increases our capacity for self-correction, whereas on-line disagreements often end up in an entrenched stand-off.

Physical presence also matters, and I know that I definitely benefit from boots on the ground, hence my frequent trips to Ireland. Like words in books, it is being in the presence of people and places which both shape and enrich the start of my Irish research thoughts. As I write down the start of what I know – first for myself, followed by a more refined version as I think of sharing these thoughts with others - each thought becomes more complete. Slowly.

A couple of recent dreams revealed to me the probable reason why I chose to even write this post. In the first dream, I had entirely lost the capacity for verbal thought. Worse, it hadn’t felt as if I were dreaming. I felt awake, frozen in terror as my husband slept on beside me, blissfully unaware. The second dream was less terrifying because it clearly was a dream. In that one, I had lost my sight while driving a car. Such dreams tend to give voice to our subconscious fears. For me, they are probably: How long will I be able to think, to learn, and then to write and share and to continue to be of service? If not, when will this stop, and what next?

These days, it already takes me a lot longer to get to the nub of whatever it might be that I am thinking, but this is not unlike my capacity for walking. I can still do the recommended 10,000 steps per day, but I do them more slowly. As for my idiosyncratic approach to research? Well, that’s just me.

Three years ago, my granddaughter (now six years old) drew two circles for heads with eyes and mouths included, and with stringy lines hanging down for legs. The big circle was her father’s head, she said, and the little circle was hers. Together, they took up half the page. There was also an energetic scribble, a very energetic scribble, that took up the upper part of the other half of the page. It felt that it must have been important to her. What is this? I asked. Grandma’s brain, she said.