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this coherence process is disrupted in Alzheimer's disease.

β-amyloid plaques

these plaques directly impair the slow wave activity.

this balance was disturbed by the protein deposits, so that inhibition was reduced.

Low doses of sleep-inducing drugs as possible therapy

For this reason, cultures all around the world have treated emotional touching as something apart. The Greeks labeled the drive to touch with the word “eros,” and they meant something vaster and deeper than just sexual pleasure.

“Animals have sex and human beings have eros, and no accurate science is possible without making this distinction,” Allan Bloom observed.

The Abrahamic religions also treat sex as something sacred and beautiful when enveloped in loving and covenantal protections, and as something disordered and potentially peace-destroying when not.

Over the past 100 years or so, advanced thinkers across the West have worked to take the shame out of sex, surely a good thing. But they’ve also disenchanted it

“One of the principal outcomes of the sexual revolution was to establish that sex is just like any other social interaction — nothing taboo or sacred about it.” Sex is seen as a shallow physical and social thing, not a heart and soul altering thing.

One unintended effect of this disenchantment is that it becomes easy to underestimate the risks inherent in any encounter.

The woman who talked in an online article about her date with Aziz Ansari is being criticized because what happened to her was not like what happened to the victims of Harvey Weinstein and Louis C.K

The assumption seems to be that as long as there’s consent between adults, everything else is kosher.

Everything we know about touch suggests that even with full consent, the emotional quality of an encounter can have profound positive or negative effects. If Ansari did treat her coldly or neglectfully, it’s reasonable to think that the shame she felt right after was the surface effect of a deeper wound. Neglectful, dehumanizing sex is not harassment, but it’s some other form of serious harm.

Disenchanting emotional touch also causes people to underestimate the way past experiences shape current behavior.

Agency is learned, not bred. And one of the things that undermines agency most powerfully is past sexual harm.

The abuse of intimacy erodes all the building blocks of agency: self-worth, resiliency and self-efficacy (the belief that you can control a situation).

It is precisely someone who lives within a culture of supposedly zipless encounters who is most likely to be unable to take action when she feels uncomfortable.

I hate the way Babe, which published the story about the Ansari date, violated everybody’s privacy here. But it seems that the beginning of good sense is to take the power of touch seriously, as something that has profound good and bad effects.

It seems that the smarter we get about technology, the dumber we get about relationships. We live in a society in which loneliness, depression and suicide are on the rise.

The guiding moral principle here is not complicated: Try to treat other people as if they possessed precious hearts and infinite souls. Everything else will follow.

There are traditionally two types of breath-focused practices -- those that emphasise focus on breathing (mindfulness), and those that require breathing to be controlled (deep breathing practices such as pranayama). In cases when a person's attention is compromised, practices which emphasise concentration and focus, such as mindfulness, where the individual focuses on feeling the sensations of respiration but make no effort to control them, could possibly be most beneficial.

Our findings could have particular implications for research into brain ageing. Brains typically lose mass as they age, but less so in the brains of long term meditators. More 'youthful' brains have a reduced risk of dementia and mindfulness meditation techniques actually strengthen brain networks.

Meanwhile, the Office of National Statistics in the UK has found that rates of depression have doubled. Both depression and anxiety are known to have an impact on memory.

Although levels of anxiety peaked when lockdown started and have gradually reduced, average levels have remained higher than in usual times, especially in people who are young, living alone, living with children, living on a low income or in urban areas

Repetition of stories helps us to consolidate our memories of what happened to us – so-called episodic memories. If we can’t socialise as much, perhaps it’s not surprising that those memories don’t feel as crystal clear as usual.

This is all made more difficult by a lack of cues to aid our memories. If you go out to work then your journey, the change of scenery and breaks you take punctuate the day, giving you time points to anchor your memorie

Then there’s a general fatigue, which also doesn’t help our memories. Zoom meetings are tiring, some work is much harder from home and holidays are getting cancelled. A lack of routine and anxiety about the pandemic can disturb our sleep. Put all that together – basically we’re consistently tired.

So with the combination of fatigue, anxiety, a lack of cues, and fewer social interactions, it’s no wonder that some of us feel our memories are letting us down.

The good news is that there are things we can do about it. Going for a walk, especially along unfamiliar streets, will bring your brain back to attention

Making sure the weekdays and the weekends are different enough not to merge into one can help with the distortions our new life can have on our perception of time.

hippocampus,

Electrodes implanted in these patients' brains help their surgeons precisely identify the seizure foci and also provide valuable information on the brain's inner workings, Lega says.

What the team found was exciting: Not only did they identify a robust population of time cells, but the firing of these cells predicted how well individuals were able to link words together in time (a phenomenon called temporal clustering). Finally, these cells appear to exhibit phase precession in humans, as predicted.

In addition, while rats are actively exploring an environment, place cells are further organized into "mini-sequences" that represent a virtual sweep of locations ahead of the rat. These radar-like sweeps happen roughly 8-10 times per second and are thought to be a brain mechanism for predicting immediately upcoming events or outcomes.

it was unclear how the hippocampus was able to produce such sequences.

hocolate milk

However, taking a closer look at the data, the researchers found something new: As the rats moved through these spaces, their neurons not only exhibited forward, predictive mini-sequences, but also backward, retrospective mini-sequences. The forward and backward sequences alternated with each other, each taking only a few dozen milliseconds to complete.

"In the past few decades, there's been an explosion in new findings about memory,"

They then compared the MRI data of participants who reported often feeling lonely with those who did not.

Researchers found the default networks of lonely people were more strongly wired together and surprisingly, their grey matter volume in regions of the default network was greater.

The fact the structure and function of this network is positively associated with loneliness may be because lonely people are more likely to use imagination, memories of the past or hopes for the future to overcome their social isolation.

In lonely people, the structure of this fibre tract was better preserved.

"In the absence of desired social experiences, lonely individuals may be biased towards internally-directed thoughts such as reminiscing or imagining social experiences.

Loneliness is increasingly being recognized as a major health problem, and previous studies have shown older people who experience loneliness have a higher risk of cognitive decline and dementia.

the urgency of reducing loneliness in today's society,

This is not to say that Alzheimer’s- and dementia-related memory impairments are fiction — they are very real — but every lapse of short-term memory doesn’t necessarily indicate a biological disorder.

Some aspects of memory actually get better as we age. For instance, our ability to extract patterns, regularities and to make accurate predictions improves over time because we’ve had more experience.

Second, older adults have to search through more memories than do younger adults to find the fact or piece of information they’re looking for. Your brain becomes crowded with memories and information.

Long lives are not the problem. The problem is living in cultures designed for lives half as long as the ones we have.

Retirements that span four decades are unattainable for most individuals and governments; education that ends in the early 20s is ill-suited for longer working lives; and social norms that dictate intergenerational responsibilities between parents and young children fail to address families that include four or five living generations.

Last year, the Stanford Center on Longevity launched an initiative called “The New Map of Life.”

it would be a mistake to replace the old rigid model of life — education first, then family and work, and finally retirement — with a new model just as rigid

there should be many different routes, interweaving leisure, work, education and family throughout life, taking people from birth to death with places to stop, rest, change courses and repeat steps along the way.

To thrive in an age of rapid knowledge transfer, children not only need reading, math and computer literacy, but they also need to learn to think creatively and not hold on to “facts” too tightly. They’ll need to find joy in unlearning and relearning.

Teens could take breaks from high school and take internships in workplaces that intrigue them. Education wouldn’t end in youth but rather be ever-present and take many forms outside of classrooms, from micro-degrees to traveling the world.

There is good reason to think we will work longer, but we can improve work quality with shorter workweeks, flexible scheduling and frequent “retirements.”

Rather than saving ever-larger pots of money for the end of life, we could pool risks in new ways

Generations may share wealth earlier than traditional bequests; we can start savings accounts at birth and allow young adults to work earlier so that compound interest can work in their favor.

Maintaining physical fitness from the beginning to end of life will be paramount. Getting children outside, encouraging sports, reducing the time we sit, and spending more time walking and moving will greatly improve individual lives.

My mom isn’t able to write or read after suffering from two strokes. In addition to early-stage dementia, she has expressive aphasia, which means she has difficulty talking. In early November, we received an email from her residential care facility saying that four staff members had tested positive. Mom tested negative. But soon after, she called telling me her next-door neighbor was sick with the virus. I started planning how I could remove my mom from the facility.

We waited until 4 p.m. for another test result, also negative, and I got her soon after. She had two bags packed and was practically running out the door — away from the boredom, loneliness, scary and confusing events, unknown staff members with covered faces.

When Covid-19 hit, all family visits were halted. Dorothy was OK at first, already accustomed to the staff feeding her twice a day. But after a while, I think it hit her. Her family was gone. We could not tell her why or where they were. We could not reassure her, although we tried.Dorothy slowly went downhill, and in July, she died. She is the collateral damage, the many who decline simply from the isolation and loss of routine, but most important, from the loss of the people who love them. She was one of many here, and she deserves a voice.

My mother is fortunate that she is in an assisted-living facility that cares. It adheres to the guidelines. Unfortunately, the very rules that keep its residents physically protected do not support their emotional health. There are no easy answers.

“The findings need to be replicated under clinical trial conditions, with larger numbers of participants and with robust blinding of subjects and outcome assessors.

induced improvements in working memory might come at the price of worsening of other areas of cognitive function.”

it could also have applications in treating disorders linked to poor working memory, such as schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease.

Without breaks in a repetitive routine, the mind has difficulty differentiating between memories, which psychologists call pattern separation,

the stress of the year itself can shift how our brains experience time

there is a medical explanation for the feeling of mental haziness: Covid brain fog, a lingering combination of dementia-like symptoms including memory loss, confusion and difficulty focusing

For some who have recovered from Covid-19

Sheer monotony has the ability to warp time and tangle our memories, psychologists say, with quarantines and lockdowns robbing us of the “boundary events” that normally divide the days, like chapters in a book.

Without the usual work mixers, festive holiday celebrations, far-flung vacations or casual dinners that typically mark and divide the calendar, the brain has a harder time processing and cataloging memories,

t doesn’t help that so much of our lives are virtual now, happening only on screens. Instead of stimulating our senses in real life — going to shops, meeting friends for coffee, chatting with colleagues in the office — we FaceTime when the mood strikes, we binge Netflix shows from three years ago and we browse Amazon perpetually

If one problem is that there is too little going on in our lives, another problem, it seems, is that there is also too much.

The unending sense of crisis is an “ongoing, chronic stressor” that can lead to a collapse of the reassuring sense that our lives move in orderly fashion: past, present, future, which is key to mental stability.

In researching the psychological repercussions of devastating Southern California wildfires in the 1990s, Dr. Holman said that victims felt like “time slowed down" and “the days blurred together.” “Their sense of reality changes,” she said. “They’re not sure what’s real anymore. They feel a sense of a blur, like time is just a blur.”

But even people in solitary confinement will tell you that the essence of that experience is something we’re all experiencing now — the deprivation of normal social contact. And human beings really do depend on each other to structure our lives and tell us who we are.”

“We’ve all had basically enough of wearing our masks and having our lives disrupted,” Ms. Spinney said, “which is what we’re seeing now with Covid fatigue.”

Or perhaps we just need to remember that time is a human construct.

In other words, welcome to the club: If you plan to live a long time, then you, too, belong to the high-risk group. Now what are you going to do about it?

—the process of thinking, learning, and remembering—can affect memory.

Anything that affects cognition

Depression, which is common with aging, causes a lack of attention and focus that can affect memory.

Brain imaging – either using computerized axial tomography (CAT) scans or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) – can help to identify strokes and tumors, which can sometimes cause memory loss.

Heavy alcohol use can cause deficiencies in vitamin B1 (

Stress, particularly because of emotional trauma, can cause memory loss. I

Doctors evaluate memory loss by taking a medical history, asking questions to test mental ability

repeated head trauma, as in boxers and footballers can result in progressive loss of memory and other effects.

Research has shown that the combination of shifting estrogen and progestin levels increased the risk of dementia in women older than 65. There is no evidence that the herb ginkgo biloba prevents memory loss.

vascular diseases (heart disease and stroke) that result from elevated cholesterol and blood pressure may contribute to the development of Alzheimer’s disease,

Don’t smoke or abuse alcohol.

Get regular exercise.

Maintain healthy eating habits.

Maintain social interactions,

Keep your brain active

Learning a foreign language helps improve memory

(Working memory deals with the storage and processing of information over a short period of time.)

Speaking a second language helps you focus, and deal with distractions appropriately

A bilingual person is accustomed to switching between different languages, deciding which is the appropriate language to use in a given situation

This gives the brain plenty of practice in focusing and filtering information.

Related to your attention span is your ability to multi-task.

Speaking two languages, and switching between them, makes you better at multi-tasking in other tasks, too.

The benefits of multiple languages can start as early as before a baby is able to speak

What this perceptual sensitivity could mean, is that babies raised with two languages will find it easier to learn other languages later in life, as a result of the ability to easily distinguish between different sounds.

Bilingual people have also been shown to have better cognitive abilities than monolinguals.

Interestingly, this is regardless of what age the person learns the foreign language, so even a person who learns a foreign language as an adult will benefit from these improved skills.

By learning another language, your mother tongue can improve as a result. As you learn a second language, your knowledge of grammar improves.

In fact, as crazy as it may sound, learning a foreign language can actually increase the size of your brain.

In this study, two groups of subjects underwent brain scans. One group did an intensive language course for three months while the other, the control group, did intensive courses in a subject that was not a language. What the scientists found was that specific parts of the language learners’ brains became bigger than those of the non-language learners.

Given all the benefits outlined in this article, it’s hardly surprising that learning a foreign language keeps your brain healthy for longer

Speaking more than one language provides constant exercise for your brain, and keeping your brain active is one way in which to delay the onset of dementia.

Whatever your age, the health benefits of learning a foreign language make it a surefire way to upgrade your life, and future-proof your brain for old age.

Social media also amounts to “a machine for getting you to care about too many things, even if they’re each indisputably worthwhile.” Hence the urge to depict every policy problem as an urgent if not existential crisis

social media has turned all of us into “angrier, less empathetic, more anxious or more numbed out” versions of ourselves.

Finally, our political and policy debates tend towards what Burkeman calls “paralyzing grandiosity” – the false notion that in the face of problems like climate change, economic inequality, and ongoing threats to democracy “only the most revolutionary, world-transforming causes are worth fighting for.” It’s a sentiment that derives from and reinforces catastrophism and absolutism as ways of thinking about politics and policy

That sentiment also often results in impotent impatience, which in turn leads to frustration, anger, and cynicism when things don’t turn out exactly as we’ve hoped. But it also allows us to avoid hard choices required in order to pull together the political coalitions necessary to effect actual change.

Four Thousand Weeks is filled to the brim with practical advice

Embrace “radical incrementalism.”

Burkeman suggests we find some hobby we enjoy for its own sake, not because there’s some benefit we think we can derive from it

Take a break

rest for rest’s sake, “to spend some of our time, that is, on activities in which the only thing we’re trying to get from them is the doing itself.”

we should cultivate the patience to see our goals through step-by-step over the long term. We’ve got to resist the need for speed and desire for rapid resolution of problems, letting them instead take the time they take.

“To make a difference,” Burkeman argues, “you must focus your finite capacity for care.”

“Consolidate your caring” and think small.

it’s perfectly fine to dedicate your time to a limited subset of issues that you care deeply about. We’re only mortal, and as Burkeman points out it’s important to “consciously pick your battles in charity, activism, and politics.”

our lives are just as meaningful and worthwhile if we spend our time “on, say caring for an elderly relative with dementia or volunteering at the local community garden” as they are if we’re up to our eyeballs in the minutiae of politics and policy. What matters is that we make things slightly better with our contributions and actions

once we give up on the illusion of perfection, Burkeman observes, we “get to roll up [our] sleeves and start work on what’s gloriously possible instead.”