It was the old guy’s 52nd birthday on Friday but for some reason the baby daughter was convinced that it was 53 and had it written on the ice cream cake she came home with and the card (which he said he could keep and use next year) It’s only when you’re
waiting to turn 19 (here in NS) that you want to add a year I told her. After that age of majority birthday the rest don’t matter. He had calls from his two ‘away’ daughters, a card which arrived on the actual date and a Toronto Maple Leafs shirt which had been hidden here for him – he’s one of the few folks who would dare to wear such a thing. He had expressed an interest in a glass plate, which has been at Charlotte Lane for the past couple of seasons so I dropped in with a gift certificate and picked it up for him. It’s apparently a cod (as the expert tells me) and looks great on top of the dining room sideboard. All kinds of excitement for a guy who had to get up at 4 a.m. as he replied to the daughter when asked if he was having a party. Supper punctuated with phone calls about bait and lobsters and time to watch a hockey game – it doesn’t get much better than that. Speaking of aging, I found this timely piece in today’s paper:Old brain may be wiserBy SARA REISTAD-LONG The New York TimesSat. May 24 -
When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong.
Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit.
The studies are analyzed in a new edition of a neurology book, Progress in Brain Research. Some brains do deteriorate with age. Alzheimer’s disease, for example, strikes 13 per cent of Americans 65 and older. But for most aging adults, the authors say, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number. Although that can be frustrating, it is often useful.
"It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing," said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. "It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind."
For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it.
When both groups were later asked questions for which the out-of-place words might be answers, the older adults responded much better.
"For the young people, it’s as if the distraction never happened," said an author of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. "But for older adults, because they’ve retained all this extra data, they’re now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they’ve soaked up from one situation to another."
Such tendencies can yield big advantages in the real world, where it is not always clear what information is important, or will become important. A seemingly irrelevant point or suggestion in a memo can take on new meaning if the original plan changes. Or extra details that stole your attention, like others’ yawning and fidgeting, may help you assess the speaker’s real impact.
"A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what’s going on than their younger peers," Hasher said. "We believe that this characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser."
In a 2003 study, researchers tested students’ ability to tune out irrelevant information when exposed to a barrage of stimuli. The more creative the students were thought to be, determined by a questionnaire on past achievements, the more trouble they had ignoring the unwanted data. A reduced ability to filter and set priorities, the scientists concluded, could contribute to original thinking.
I had fired off an email to the cruise speaking agency recruiter after I found that all the Maritimes/New England positions were filled until the end of the season, when I didn’t have a reply to my request for either Sept or Oct. I asked if it would be possible to do special interest topics rather than destination if it meant that I had to wait at least a year to express interest again. I received a reply asking if I’d found any special interest positions in the Maritimes/New England schedule as that what my topics were on file for. I haven’t heard back after I made a point by point rebuttal saying that my topics could be generalized as lobstering is a world wide industry, NS Duck Tollers are more common in Scandinavia than here, etc etc. and finished up by saying my topic list almost exactly matched a gentleman speaking on Orient lines in the Mediterranean last fall. I closed with that since I was as experienced both professionally and personally I could come up with topics on just about anything, what would she suggest? Needless to say I’m still waiting for a reply. I was most ticked to think that if it were going to be a year before I got into the circuit they could at least have been up front with that. Mind you there are surely other agencies out there and if this doesn’t work out I’ll do the audition thing again, at least I have my materials together. It was rubbing salt in the wound to find the brochures and DVD from Princess Cruises, which I’d ordered for research purposes in the mail yesterday.
The way I look at it, it’s good that we have a daughter out west so have an excuse to take a trip in that direction. I’ve already started checking out ‘things to do’ in Calgary online and the list is long so no time to feel sorry. She has already begun to find her way around the city well and is heading out to Red Deer for a course on Monday so expanding her horizons. Speaking of which it appears she lives in one of the smartest cities in Canada, check it out:
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/080521/national/smart_canada
I made my way out to the vets and dropped off $90 for tick, flea and worm treatments for the companion animals. Don’t laugh it could’ve been worse as they applied the discount for treating four or more animals. I asked about vaccination against lyme disease for the dog as there were black legged ticks found in a survey in Gunning Cove. They are the type of ticks, which carry lyme disease so now Public Health is just waiting for the test results to see if they are positive. The biggest challenge with the dog is getting her to the vet, as she does NOT handle transport in a vehicle well. The $70 price tag for the two injections is another matter but at least the shots can be given at the same time as regular immunizations.
As a general interest topic I’m including the link to a story about a man who lost a case about finding a fly in a water bottle (which he incidentally didn’t drink out of), which traumatized him, big time. The Supreme Court ruled he shouldn’t have reacted so if he were normally resilient. Hmmm:
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/cbc/080522/canada/canada_scoc_fly
This afternoon I dragged a load of yard sale stuff, which I had stored, in the barn from the old house out to the car to take to the library one day this week for the town wide yard sale happening June 7th. Have to get all caught up on chores as I’ll be away the week before that at a conference in Montreal. Hopefully the weather will sunny as predicted tomorrow so I can scratch a bit in the dirt and get the yard settled. All the transplanted perennial and shrubs seem to making their scheduled appearances after their move so I’m pleased – noticed the lungwort is blooming and the tulips are almost ready to bloom out front. The past few days have been showery which adds to a beautiful green landscape while giving an excuse not to walk, although the dog doesn’t agree.
And with the plan to leave you with a smile I’m pasting two of the more printable jokes, which a retired nurse friend sent along. They must be multigenerational as the student nurse (who is working a night shift as I type) found them amusing too:
EMBARRASSING MEDICAL EXAMS
1. A man comes into the ER and yells, "My wife's going to have her baby in the cab!" I grabbed my stuff, rushed out to the cab, lifted the lady's dress, and began to take off her underwear. Suddenly, I noticed that there were several cabs -- and I was in the wrong one.
Submitted by Dr. Mark MacDonald, San Antonio , TX .
2. At the beginning of my shift, I placed a stethoscope on an elderly and slightly deaf female patient's anterior chest wall. "Big breaths," I instructed. "Yes, they used to be," replied the patient.
Submitted by Dr. Richard Byrnes, Seattle , WA
