Interesting program on NPR regarding the fairly common problem of pre-frontal lobe atrophy.   Ravel was coming down with it as he wrote Bolero, and the structure of the piece reflects the removal of the moderating circuitry in the pre-frontal lobe.  Typically, victims will go thru a phase in which they generate amazing repetitive pattens...

I'm thinking about my "On Morals" blog, but there are numerous other blog articles in which I tend to repeat myself, with slight variations.  Or, it could be just my incessant habit of applying anything I've read or heard into my core belief stack.  That said, I've also lost a good deal of my basic arithmetic competence.  That could simply be due to lack of use, but it  - and spelling - are annoying.  I will stare at a common word that I've typed thousands of times, and something is telling me that it just doesn't look right...  Unfortunately there apparently isn't much money to be made on definitive tests for conditions such as Aspergers, Alzheimers or Parkinsons.  It's as often as not the patient who brings the diagnosis to the specialist.

What I worry about is the parallel to muscular decline.  Past a certain point exercise simply doesn't work.  The amount of muscle mass lost is greater than that gained and more exercise simply makes it worse.  And meanwhile, your joints are demanding access to a time machine, as nothing else seems to work.*

BTW, I DID find one thing that made me feel twenty years younger.  Prednisone.

I was using it at my doctor's insistence to treat ongoing colitis, which is nasty stuff.  After about a month of building up to a clinical level, I started feeling GREAT!  So long as I was on the prednisone, everything - mental, muscular, libido, digestive - all of it suddenly reverted to about year 1998.  Unfortunately, even though there is only a minor hazard to long term use, my doctor didn't want to take any chances, and took me off after about three months. The withdrawal was HELL.  My gastroenterologist told me to tell my rheumatologist, who is only interested in surgery, so even though we have a seeming cure, I can't get it.

There is also evidence that mental exercise, especially highly focused creative work, causes brain cancer, or at least correlates. The odd thing is that now I can't find a link to that news.  I didn't make it up, but I've noticed several incidences now in which articles that got significant media coverage then simply disappeared so far as the search engines response.

Also, certain topics seem to be invisible.  It looks like a search glitch.  I wonder if everyone is now using the neural net approach, which seems - as in the case of Google Translate - to tend toward results that concentrate around commonalities, leaving out interesting alternatives.