The good news is I have not experienced age-related mental decline. The bad news is I still don’t get the jokes.
An item titled, “Grandma Doesn’t get It” in my favorite news magazine, The Week, said Washington University researchers gave humor comprehension tests to 40 seniors and 40 young students. One test was to choose the proper punch line for a verbal joke; the other was to pick a proper ending panel of a comic strip. The old folks got it wrong and the kids mostly got it right.
This is nothing new to me. I’ve been not getting it since I was in grade school – a social misfit from always being the youngest. But it’s worried me lately that I never seem able to come up with a funny caption for the weekly New Yorker cartoon contest.
Mind, Mood & Memory, the newsletter that sends me crossword puzzles and other mental exercises, but has yet to teach me to like Sudoku, recently published a somewhat critical review of some popular new brain-training programs. However, JAMA reported a study in which 2,800 healthy seniors who strengthened their minds with brain exercises fared better than a control group, which presumably twiddled their thumbs while the others had 10 training sessions to improve memory, reasoning or mental processing speed. Five years later, the memory training group did 75 percent better on memory tasks; the reasoning group outscored the controls by 40 percent; and those trained in rapid processing did a whopping 300 percent better in measures of speed. Even so, software programs such as BrainWare Safari and MindFit and subscription Web-based programs like Happy-Neuron.com, with costs of up to $395, may be no better than doing crossword puzzles, board games or learning a foreign language, the newsletter states. Or learning a new computer program, I might add.
Anyway, last week I got the good news from the nurse who came to check the result of my TB test (negative) and take my medical history. All this so I might be allowed to live at Aspen Pointe, a tony residence for seniors. This included a three-page oral test of cognitive function. Example: “I’ll give you three words and after some other questions ask you to repeat them. Penny, Dog, Tree.” Well, that was easy. I once had a dog named Penny who lifted its leg on a tree. Never mind that Penny, a female pointer, had an apparent gender identity conflict.
I was a bit slower on the math section, orally subtracting seven from about a dozen double- and triple-digit numbers. Accurate but slow. By the end of the first page, the nurse told me she didn’t think we needed to do the rest. Obviously, my cognitive abilities were not impaired, she said. We spent the rest of the time talking about journalism.
Back to Mind Mood & Memory, the September issue reported “A Common-Scents Test for Alzheimer’s disease.” Using a simple “scratch and sniff” test, researchers measured the ability of 589 mentally alert older adults to identify 12 common scents such as turpentine, lemon and soap. After five years, 177 (30 percent) had developed mild cognitive impairment. Researchers reported an association between difficulty identifying odors and MCI. Subjects able to identify only eight of the 12 odors were 50 percent more likely to develop MCI than those who identified 11 of 12. Good news: I have the nose of a bloodhound, although I’m not sure I could tell lemon from soap since my favorite soap is lemon scented.
So, aside from my inability to remember dozens of names of people I’ve met in the last few weeks, I’m officially unimpaired.
Scarier news in MM&M concerns protecting the brain through healthier food preparation. Animal products (meat and cheese) produce unhealthy levels of toxic substances if they are cooked at high temperatures using low moisture. That would be grilling, frying or broiling. The toxic substances are “advanced glycation end products.” The dreaded AGEs build up in the body and may lead to oxidative stress and inflammation associated with, that’s right, Alzheimer’s. It seems boiling, steaming or stewing is safer. Now, I don’t eat much meat, but has anybody ever tried to boil a cheese sandwich? The more AGEs people get in their diet, the higher the levels in their blood. And higher levels in seniors were directly related to elevated levels of key indicators of inflammation and cell damage (oxidation). Good grief. Did I really need to know this?
Oh, well, with any luck at all I won’t remember it tomorrow.