Tuesday 18 May 2021

Early onset dementia in left handers

It comes as no surprise that the atrophy of the brain should attack left handers first.

In the early development of the brain, left handers brains develop with the focus on their left-handedness just as a right-hander would focus on the development of the skills centres of their brain.

Living in a right-handed world left-handers learn to become more ambidextrous. This is a great advantage learning to catch with both hands is a recognized trait and playing sport right-handed is often a consequence of economical bias. Let's face it who's going to buy a left handed set of golf clubs when there's a right-handed set of handmedoons.

While the brain develops, the left hander then starts to use and develop the skills centres in the brain that the right handers use,  constructing bridges with these wonderful neurons in their own brains.

Many studies have shown natural thinking for the left hander looks like lateral thinking to the right hander because the brains been developed in a different way.

Sadly however it's can be like the hare and the tortoise. Keeping the brain functioning at this level is not always easy and so left handers are more prone to early onset dementia.

The reason seems quite simple to me. There are areas of the left handed brain that stop functioning and this atrophy starts a sequence of events. Having developed in childhood these areas are discarded in later life effectively boxes in the attic. Some people have dry attics but not all attics are the same.

Boxes in the attic can often just stay there but they can get eaten by mice, in left handers they seem to go mouldy more often and the little bits of brain that like middle age muscle, starts to atrophy, in left handers there is more to go off and so they do.

I'm not confused by left handers early onset but I would like to know why the boxes in the attic don't always go mouldy. I presume as with Covid-19 some people are more prone than others. 

As I approach 60 I'm aware a few of my boxes have gone missing! My abilities have declined at a rapid rate recently and understanding it has made it less of a challenge. Whereas I juggled 50 plates in my working life I never noticed dropping 10, now I juggle 2 and I watch them both crashing to the floor. It's very funny but also advisable to stop juggling before I run out of plates.

One of my greatest strengths now is sleeping. I never forget to do it and I can do it for long periods. I have also become more binary. I like writing but I'm really just a blether. I've neither the vocabulary or the creative skills to make it interesting, but I do like to blether, crossing the border into slavering after the second glass of wine. I think this is why I took so well to the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. The life is very simple. You get up and you walk. You feed yourself on the way and then you arrive at your home for the night. You wash, feed yourself again, drink some wine, blether a bit, snore in a dorm and repeat. Over a month it is compelling. Some might think I'm describing it like nurse kratchit and indeed it feels as wonderful as some drugs do.

If I have missed anything during lockdown it has been wandering through tapas bars in Burgos or Leon, lunching in Lorca, or living in Cardenuela del Rio pico, Eirexe, etc or climbing the hills to mont del perdon or O'Cebriero. I'll be fascinated to find out how my directional sense is bearing up. I always called intuition the sixth sense and I am very intuitive, but it is something that has declined lately.

When driving the other day I made a wrong turn. It wasn't a major disaster in our journey but it was in my own journey. I knew it wasn't the turning I wanted but my intuition didn't stop me. It's a journey I've made 15-20 times and I know it's the third turn off not the first. Unfortunately it wasn't a coded message but a stark slap in the face with a right handed croquet mallet.

I've been trying to get involved in trials for a while and how ironic the call would come through when we were driving!

I'll keep you posted if I remember.

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