FS Elders
This morning I was looking for the website of the National Institute of Mental Health. I searched by acronym but I wasn't getting it quite right. I tried "NIHM" for some reason and was thrilled to find the website for the New Iceland Heritage Museum. Trying again with "NIMS," I was captivated for several minutes reading the sites for FEMA's National Incident Management System and Japan's National Institute for Materials Science.
Finally I got it right with NIMH (right above the link for National Institute of Medical Herbalists and NiMHbattery.com) but by then I'd forgotten why I was searching for it.
But I wanted to make a point about mental health and curiosity. There's a blurb on the radio that talks about staving off Alzheimer's by a lifetime of learning and exercising the gray matter. I'm for that. That's my strategy, although there's been some suggestion that I'm already losing the battle.
I'm currently reading Lakoff's "Philosophy In the Flesh." One of the examples Lakoff uses to show that our construct of reality is physiologically-based, is the concept of color. Color doesn't exist as an objective reality outside of the brain. Color is a psychological experience created when external stimuli tickle the receptors in the eye, sending signals zooming up the optic nerve to be turned into an experience of color by the visual cortex. I remember this from my undergraduate psychology class, Sensory and Perceptual Processes.
I love this idea. There's a delight in anything that tweaks our assumed notions about reality. Kind of like finding out that the Flight Sim team is made up of real people and not borg units.
So, I'm way off topic but I'm really not. The point is that the world is such a fascinating place full of connected information and six-degrees-of-separated people, that there's no reason to ever get bored...or senile.
My dad will turn 85 years old next month. He's one of the most computer-savvy people I know, all self-taught very late in life. He can program in Excel. One of his hobbies is astronomy and he'll spend hours creating spreadsheets with formulas that calculate star positions. He does it just for fun. He's also an 1100-hour private pilot and enjoys flying the 737 in Flight Simulator.
Dad's getting pretty creaky these days and has clearly slowed way down from being the perpetual-motion machine he was even five years ago. But he never stops.
I hope that his persistence is genetic but I'm not taking any chances. I'll keep being curious, thank you very much. Now, why was I looking for the NIMH website?
