What is the best way to protect your mind? As you age, how can you best ensure that your mental capacities are in good working order?
These issues rarely get raised by doctors during annual physicals or other appointments. And yet they remain vital for the health of patients, especially us older people.
There is one candidate for public office whom I will never vote for. That’s not because the candidate belongs to a party that I do not support. Nor is it a matter of gender or religion or likability.
The person I will never choose on an election day is the one who promises never to raise taxes.
If anyone deserves to be a pessimist, Robert Jay Lifton would seem ideally equipped. After all, this psychiatrist-scholar, now in his middle 80s, has spent much of his career studying groups of people connected with some of the greatest evils of the 20th century.
These four groups are 1) people subjected to “thought reform” forced on them by Chinese communists in mid-century; 2) victims of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945; 3) anti-war American veterans of the Vietnam War; and 4) doctors who cooperated with the Nazi regime.
Among the new photos in my computerized collection, one stands out for peculiarity. It focuses on a toilet. Among the thousands in my files, this is the only bathroom view.
My excuse? This toilet rates as an historical object. In the first four years of the twentieth century, it was used by Franklin D. Roosevelt.
When it comes to cellular biology, I confess profound ignorance. The subject, undeveloped when I did my schooling, escaped me almost entirely. I am awed when I hear the human body contains ten trillion cells, but I have only the vaguest idea what cells look like and how they function.
Starting decades ago, each springtime, I would watch some of my fellow alumni in Harvard Yard as they marched in celebration of their sixtieth reunion. Most of them walked confidently, though somewhat guardedly, on their own; some of them used canes; a few sat in wheelchairs as they were pushed along.
These men all impressed me the same way: They struck me as awfully old. That made them different from me, different enough to make it seem unlikely that I could ever look quite like them.
Many Americans, arriving at middle or later life, change careers. I have known one man who went from being a butcher to becoming a sculptor. And another friend has jumped from being a financial investor to being a portrait painter.
Both of them accomplished the leap with notable success. The former butcher made statues that adorned cemeteries and churches. The second has seen his portraits grace the halls of a famous university.