The spectrum of our intellectual and emotional states, from curiosity, learning, exploration, and innovation to joy, happiness, love, and sadness all stem from that wonderful clump of neurons no larger than our two fists pressed together; intricate, tiny, fragile, and magnificent.
Go ahead, hold your two fisted hands together palm to palm and behold the entirety of what and who you are, all magnificently encased in that small space.
Your iPhone suddenly looks paltry in comparison, right?
It takes only 3% of the brain’s mass to atrophy for dementia to set in and in the most severe cases that number reaches 8 -10%. That’s about as much as one of your fingers.
It doesn’t seem like much, but few things are as hard to witness as the slow progression and inevitable outcome of that long decline from 3 to 10%. I saw it in my mother’s decade long struggle with one of the more horrifying of dementia’s causes.
“Just one night of deep-sleep disruption was enough to increase the amount of amyloid-beta, a protein that clumps into brain cell