One Brain's journey

I had occasion to have lunch yesterday with a friend of a friend, who it turned out, has a tremendous fear of developing Alzheimer’s Disease. I was able to share with her some finings that I had recently come across from what is now simply called the nuns study and although results were published a few years ago there was one major finding that I thought might be reassuring. There was a correlation between what the researchers referred to as the presence of grammatical complexity and idea density in the nuns autobiographies (submitted when they applied to join the order) and the subsequent development of Alzheimer’s symptoms. An even more interesting finding arose from the autopsies performed by the researchers after the nuns had passed away. There were nuns who had the physical aspects of the disease, in other words the presence of plague and damaged areas of their brains, but they had no apparent symptoms. I already know that one aspect of neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to retrain healthy areas to replace functions lost from other damaged areas of the brain. It wasn’t stated in the article I read in Time magazine that this is what had happened with these nuns but I find that even the possibility that I could retain cognitive functioning in spite of the fact that my brain might be damaged by Alzheimer’s to be enormously reassuring. The friend-of-a-friend I met yesterday did not seem as reassured but I thought I did detect a faint glimmer of hope in her eyes…