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Living With an Aging Brain: Advice from Israel

DOV BURT LEVY
Special to The Jewish Journal

If you’re like most people over 50 years old, or in fact like me, the aging brain is not your favorite conversation topic. So, enjoy my favorite brain story before I tell you of a very good new book on the subject.

Harry and Morris, both over 70, have been friends for 40 years. After not seeing each other for a while, they got together at Morris’s home. Morris is telling Harry of a seminar he attended the previous weekend.

“What a great time I had. Glad I went with the wife. It was a seminar on memory improvement. We had lectures, films, visualizations and role-playing. Just a lot of good, old-fashioned fun.”

“Sounds good to me. Tell me, where was it held?” asks Harry.

Morris looked blank. “Now where was that place?” he mutters, his eyes and nose squished together in total concentration.

“Wait a minute. Tell me, Harry, what’s that popular flower, usually red with all those thorns on the stem?”

“Oh, you mean rose, replies Harry.

“Yup, that’s it,” Morris says and shouts into the other room: “Rose, Rose. Remind me, where did we attend that seminar last weekend?”

I think most people get a kick out of that story because it just flits around a subject they are uncomfortable talking about. Oh, yes, a joke here and there. A little probing to see how their friends are doing in the memory department, but to talk seriously about dementia, especially the possibility of their own, is something that few seniors care to do.

So, across my desk comes a helpful new book: Living with an Aging Brain: A Self-Help Guide for your Senior Years by Robert Werman, MD. He writes the book as if it is your doctor’s visit, except that here he is prepared to take all the time necessary to answer all your questions and even listen to your issues.

Dr. Werman is a highly respected physician-neurologist living in Jerusalem. He trained in neurology at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City, then two years in the U.S. Navy as neurologist and psychiatrist, followed by a post-doc and appointment as assistant professor of neurology at Columbia University Medical School. After a year of research in Cambridge, England, he was appointed Research Professor of Psychiatry at Indiana University. He moved to Israel as professor of neurophysiology at Hebrew University in 1967 and had a distinguished career before retirement.

I tell you all this because lots of self-help books are written primarily to help the writer buy a new big house or enlarge his/her savings account. Not the case here. He wrote it, I think, to respond to that old Jewish self-nagging that says: “Do something helpful for people,” along with the need to keep his own aging brain well-exercised. I met him in Jerusalem and can tell you he is a renaissance man of great intellect, authority and humor.

I approached the book with three questions that have bugged me for a number of years, although I never found time to get answers. He answered these and at least 40 more.
First, how does normal aging affect the brain? I know for sure that aging affects my back, skin, hair, veins, arteries, and almost everything else, including the number of prescription and vitamin pills I take daily. What about my brain?

Answer: The brain is composed of billions of nerve cells (technical name: neurons) that send and receive communication from other nerve cells. When we are young, the neurons are firing on many paths in order to deliver the messages. (That’s why when I was 25 years old, I could soak my brain with caffeine, stay up all night, even have a cold, and still do well on a university exam the next day.)
Beginning about age 20, people start losing nerve cells every day. At age 70, people won’t know less (actually more) but some of the many brain paths between neurons will have closed down. Normally, we are okay. But if ill, taking certain medications or having a week of bad sleep, a person may have more senior moments.

As Dr. Werman puts it, “Understanding that the bad moments will pass is a powerful incentive to patience. If we wait, we will once again be in control of our mental processing, make adjustments in life style in order [to] take advantage of the good times and learn to be patient with the bad moments.”

Second question, what are my chances of getting dementia or even the dreaded Alzheimer’s disease?

Answer: Dr. Werman writes: “Mental deterioration does not express itself at nearly the same rate as other physical declines do, because we have built-in mental reserves, brain mechanisms that help us compensate for loss. Senility is far less common than most of us think. At any age group, whether 60 – 70, 70 – 80, 80 – 90, or even those over 95, the senile are far from the majority. [And] it is probable that in the future, drugs will become available to slow the processes that lead to aging of the brain.” Thanks Doc, good news.

Third, what can I do to minimize risks? After all, I walk and exercise five times a week, floss my teeth, put fake tears in my eyes, exercise my sphincters every day. Why not something for my aging brain?

Answer: Dr. Werman says, “Find one other aging person with whom you can trade war stories — tales of forgotten names and appointments, once-familiar routes that now appear strange — someone who will listen to you talk about your work and your play, to whom you will in turn listen as they describe what is troubling them. Talking about your successes, as insignificant they may seem, is good for the soul, and talking about your failures is powerful medicine.”

He also suggests all kinds of ways to exercise your brain by having an active mind, the old and very true admonition for every part of your body: use it or lose it. He discusses the relationship between exercised bodies and functioning brains, the consequences of depression, how food, alcohol, medicine and drugs influence the brain.

All of this written with humor, good will and most important a sense of having been there. Finally, Dr. Werman emphasizes flexibility exercises, consciously using your left hand (makes good sense but new to me) and about the importance of doing things involving planning.

He tells many stories about people, famous and unknown, to illustrate his points. My favorite is that of Itzhak Perlman, world famous violinist, stricken with polio as a child, who, in 1995 was the soloist at Lincoln Center in New York City. Perlman, with braces and crutches, walked across to his place on the stage.

“Then Perlman placed his Stradivarius violin under his chin, nodded to the conductor and proceeded to play. Just as Perlman finished the first few bars of the concerto, a violin string broke. Everyone could hear it snap. Would Perlman go off the stage to replace the broken string? Would he use another instrument? [Perlman] waited a moment, closed his eyes and then signaled to the conductor to begin again. The orchestra started to play, and Perlman resumed the concerto from where he had left off, playing with a passion, power and purity that most had never heard before.

“It is impossible, we all know, to play a violin concerto with just three strings. But that night Perlman refused to know that. [When he finished] the people rose and cheered — an extraordinary outburst of applause from every corner of the auditorium. ‘Bravo,’ they shouted. Perlman smiled, wiped the sweat from his brow, and raised his bow to quiet them. He spoke, not boastfully, but in a pensive, reverent tone: ‘You know, sometimes it is the artist’s task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.’”

Dr. Werman’s response to that story, mine as well, and I hope yours too, is, “What a powerful statement. [It] could serve as a definition of life — not just for artists but for all of us, particularly those of us who find we are faced with the loss of abilities that accompanies aging.”

Living with an Aging Brain: A Self-Help Guide for your Senior Years, by Robert Werman, M.D., published by the Freund Publishing House LTD (London and Tel Aviv). Order from Freund Publishing, P.O. Box 35010, Tel Aviv, 61350, Israel. US$25.00, includes airmail shipping, or www.freundpublishing.com.