We’re flooded with information on the bad things which can happen to the brain and with some advice, or at least implied advice, on how to avoid many of them. For example, we Americans are obsessed with sports in which violence has become the main point of it all. We also send a significant percentage of our young men and women into military situations (not just in battlefield units) where they risk brain injuries and it turns out that a Single Traumatic Brain Injury May Prompt Long-Term Neurodegeneration.
There are other causes for neurodegeneration, including the problems leading to Alzheimer’s and to other forms of dementia. In this article, Over Half of Alzheimer’s Cases May Be Preventable, Say Researchers, we can read:
Over half of all Alzheimer’s disease cases could potentially be prevented through lifestyle changes and treatment or prevention of chronic medical conditions, according to a study led by Deborah Barnes, PhD, a mental health researcher at the San Francisco VA Medical Center.
Analyzing data from studies around the world involving hundreds of thousands of participants, Barnes concluded that worldwide, the biggest modifiable risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease are, in descending order of magnitude, low education, smoking, physical inactivity, depression, mid-life hypertension, diabetes and mid-life obesity.
In the United States, Barnes found that the biggest modifiable risk factors are physical inactivity, depression, smoking, mid-life hypertension, mid-life obesity, low education and diabetes.
And another article speaks of evidence that Physical Activity [is] Linked to Lower Rates of Cognitive Impairment. Lest we miss the message, we can also read that Keeping Up Your Overall Health May Keep Dementia Away, Study Suggests.
We’re strange creatures in many ways. Rational we are, potentially, but we form habits which are in conflict with what we know or can easily learn and we don’t bother to work on changing those habits.
Can we be saved by chemicals? Will the drug industry provide us with silver bullets for our cancers and cholesterol problems? Will they give us happy pills one day, turning each of us into a two-legged Golden Retriever just soaking in our own deep puddles of dopamine? Well, the brain didn’t evolve to make us happy and it’s unlikely that we can force it to just make us feel good all the time. After all, a lot of our problems, including much of our general feelings of — in a manner of speaking — alienation, are for real. We need to learn how to deal with them. We need to feel an energizing level of upset when it’s the world which is wrong and needs changed. We need to learn how to achieve a certain wholeness which allows us to function in our physical and social environments in such a way that we can feel some sort of purpose and detect some sort of meaning in the flow of events which are our lives and the greater stories in which we’re embedded.
It would hardly be surprising if it turns out that Patients Who Use Anti-Depressants Are More Likely to Suffer Relapse, Researcher Finds, though there are a number of complications and possible data problems in any complex meta-analysis, and there is an art to combining the potentially incompatible data of a number of independent studies. I say it would be hardly surprising partly for the reasons of “moral purpose” discussed above and partly because of comments I’ve read in the books of serious brain scientists to the effect of: the brain is so complex and complicated that there will be no easy chemical solutions to reset a brain which is tending strongly toward a bad state. The psychologists who conducted the meta-analysis discussed in the article say much the same.
I’ve hit upon this general issue of brain/mind health repeatedly and I’m do so again partly because of the likelihood the West, Western Europe and Central Europe and the United States in particular, are about to pass through some rough times. In a strong sense, we have minds which are shaped to one extent or another as reflections of this world of decaying moral order, this world in which we seem to have lost purpose and meaning.
We need to remember we have some significant amount of control over the shaping of our own minds, so long as we truly intend to have such control, that is, so long as we make the long-term effort to develop our minds in the way of an organ which is part of a greater organism. In particular, we need to keep our brains healthy and use them to shape minds which can support a new phase of Western Civilization or maybe a civilization so different as to gain a new name from historians. The minds we shape will be that new civilization.