Dahn Yoga in California

The brain is the seat of our humanity. The first spark of brainwave activity
marks the beginning of each human life; the final cessation of that activity
marks that life’s end. Every experience, emotion, and memory reaches us
through the brain’s mediation. It is the source of all our art, science, and
culture. Powered by untold trillions of neural connections, we hug our children,
learn to hit a baseball, write first novels, pray to our gods, and reach
out to help our fellows in need. In practical terms, we are our brains.
Consequently, it can be disturbing to reach middle age or beyond and hear what the popular media has to say about the things that are in store for our brains as we grow older. Our culture is filled with images of aged individuals whose minds are foggy, confused, and useless.

When we think of old age and the brain, we think of words such as dementia, Alzheimer’s disease,
and Parkinson’s disease. Even if our thoughts are not concerned with such doom and gloom, conventional wisdom still tells us that finding a vigorous, creative, energetic, improving brain in an aging body is as rare as finding buried treasure at the bottom of the ocean.
None of us like to think about losing our memory or our ability to think and reason as we age. Yet that is precisely what most of us believe will happen no matter what we do. So we passively accept the notion of
becoming forgetful and assume it’s inevitable. We fret over memory lapses in our fifties and sixties and worry that we are experiencing an early onset of Alzheimer’s or some other form of dementia. We tell uneasy jokes about seniors who have lost their identities and laugh while we pray that we won’t be the butt of someone else’s joke when we’re ninety. Well, perhaps it’s high time for some myth-busting about the aging brain.

In Full Bloom -by Ilchi Lee -