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Me an' Algernon – grappling with (temporary) cognitive decline
31–40 of 79 posts
Re: Me an' Algernon – grappling with (temporary) cognitive decline
#32> When I re-read Flowers for Algernon recently I was just sad. The second half of the story, where his mind is going away, is just brutal, especially when he can remember how smart he was but knows it's gone for good. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21544149 "Von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same pr…
Watching my grandmother slide helplessly into the dark mental abyss of dementia and then be lost inside it for years made me realize that it is downright inhumane to not offer end of life assistance to people.
bit ironic, all this effort to extend life but it turns out that living that long isn't always so great so we start euthanizing folks.
I'm not saying it's wrong or right (I don't have a full opinion on the matter yet) but it seems very indicative of human endeavors more generally. Like a big a cosmic joke.
Re: Me an' Algernon – grappling with (temporary) cognitive decline
#33I used to get this pretty regularly, I thought I just keep burning out. I have an unusually high IQ and noticed that my symptoms were very similar to the string of condensed matter physicists that committed suicide. Their descriptions of their health issues before they killed themselves mirrored my own and I too used the Flowers from Algernon to describe my difficulties to others. I shared other weird stuff like extreme sleep difficulty and extreme noise intolerance. I found out only relatively recently it was due to ME/CFS which was from undiagnosed hEDS, a condition nowhere near as rare as it’s thought to be. I had been to see a huge amount of doctors and none of them diagnosed me with this despite being a walking bag of symptoms and having extreme hyper-mobility. Anyway, I think tech, like physics, has a fairly strong IQ selection criteria bias so I’ve noticed a concentration of the same health issues here on HN.
The characteristic brain fog seems to be tied to dysautonomia and excess IL-1B pro-inflammatory cytokines. I treat the latter with a strict no sugar diet, and high doses of D3, TUDCA, and DIM. I treat the dysautonomia with LDN, modafinil, amitryptiline, and a low dose of semaglutide (ozempic).
Re: Me an' Algernon – grappling with (temporary) cognitive decline
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
why not try to cure alzheimer or other mental diseases that show up on the elderly instead?
I doubt you can cure these diseases, you can perhaps prevent them, but to cure would mean removing their effects, and if you could remove their effects and say, bring a seriously deteriorated Von Neumann back to his previous mental heights it seems like you should be able to make anyone the equal of Von Neumann - which I agree would be a great thing to be able to do but seems to be a much further along than the words…
There is a world of difference between removing an inhibitor and adding an enhancement.
Re: Me an' Algernon – grappling with (temporary) cognitive decline
#35I have a fairly unusual genetic disorder, and quite rare to boot in this particular variant. The gold standard cocktail contains a medication which, while effective in dealing with one facet of the pain, absolutely turns down the dimmer switch on my mind in fairly particular ways. Gait is affected the next day, along with a mild aphasia. During the peak, however, I am dumb as a box of rocks. Math and spatial business seem fine. I can still program, however. Just do not talk to me, as communication is ... troublesome.
I usually skip this portion of the cocktail unless things are particularly bad. The disorder is progressive, so when it comes for my brain, well, that's when things are over. I do not have much going on for me in terms of personal value except for, well, solving problems.
A very close friend of mine has had two hospitalizations for gangrene, and the second one absolutely devastated his cognitive abilities. He has leveled off at about eighty-five percent of where he was before. If he is tired or feeling unwell, verbal perseveration begins.
My mother is fairly well-on in her years. She used to have a tremendous vocabulary, despite her very limited education. Now, she has begun to lose words and I end up "translating" for her because I know what she is getting at. She could do crosswords but refuses to, even the Monday selections, which are typically the easiest. Very recently, she has begun misplacing things. I had my suspicions, and during a routine head, neck, and brain imaging for something else, I checked out the results and, sure enough, some loss of volume in the right hippocampus.
Re: Me an' Algernon – grappling with (temporary) cognitive decline
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have conflicting feelings on it On one hand, I had a similar experience with my grandfather. He eventually couldn't even remember to speak English, he reverted to his childhood language. When we translated, he thought I was a childhood friend of his, not his grandson. It was awful But sometimes he would be so lucid and remember everything. It was so awful thinking that "he is still in there" the idea of him choosin…
> I have conflicting feelings on it As ardent a supporter of assisted death as I am, I really don't think there's any other way to feel about it. You illustrate exactly why these types of choices will never be easy.
Yeah, to clarify I do support it. I think reducing suffering is a noble goal and allowing people to choose not to suffer needlessly is overall a good thing
But it definitely is not cut and dry and I can see why some people are extremely resistant to the idea
Re: Me an' Algernon – grappling with (temporary) cognitive decline
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Watching my grandmother slide helplessly into the dark mental abyss of dementia and then be lost inside it for years made me realize that it is downright inhumane to not offer end of life assistance to people.
bit ironic, all this effort to extend life but it turns out that living that long isn't always so great so we start euthanizing folks. I'm not saying it's wrong or right (I don't have a full opinion on the matter yet) but it seems very indicative of human endeavors more generally. Like a big a cosmic joke.
There's a really big gap between 'living so long' and 'living with a lovecraftian deteriorating and debilitating disease'
Re: Me an' Algernon – grappling with (temporary) cognitive decline
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
This happened to me during the pandemic. High (insupportable) stress, plus a year or two of significantly too little sleep, plus social isolation. It was terrifying. I had just seen my mom taken by Alzheimer’s (or something similar) way too young, and thought my life was over. All the tests coming back negative, making a point of hanging out with friends, returning to the office, and getting enough sleep seemed to he…
I am somewhat the opposite. The pandemic was great for me. Being able to work remotely is wonderful. Much less stressful than commuting daily, more free time, less scrutiny during work hours and I don't live alone so staying home isn't isolating I definitely do need to spend more time out of the house with friends and such though Most of my current stress is due to AI fears, layoffs looming, uncertain about the futur…
I think sleep is possibly the most important part. I also did a sleep study and started using a CPAP machine: might want to look into that if it’s a possibility…
Re: Me an' Algernon – grappling with (temporary) cognitive decline
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt you can cure these diseases, you can perhaps prevent them, but to cure would mean removing their effects, and if you could remove their effects and say, bring a seriously deteriorated Von Neumann back to his previous mental heights it seems like you should be able to make anyone the equal of Von Neumann - which I agree would be a great thing to be able to do but seems to be a much further along than the words…
> I agree would be a great thing to be able to do but seems to be a much further along than the words cure or prevent would indicate. If the words "cure" or "prevent" don't indicate that, why did you bring it up? :) I think this is being needlessly pedantic. Keeping in mind that one of HN's guidelines is to respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of a comment, I think we can assume that GP meant, essentiall…
sorry but the strongest plausible interpretation of the word cure is obviously not "prevent", it is to undo the damage.
>If the words "cure" or "prevent" don't indicate that, why did you bring it up? :)
the strongest plausible interpretation of my comment would be I brought it up for the reason I said - that if you could cure the disease you would have to be able to give anyone the capabilities the disease destroyed (because these diseases seem to destroy parts of the brain so even if you "brought back" the brain it would be a different brain with different data in it)- and that, although I did not state it, I felt that the original poster had not considered this when they expressed a wish to cure.
on edit: obviously if you have experienced minor damage you can get back to what you were before because the brain has a lot of redundancies and it can recover if decline is halted, but if you have experienced major damage you're probably not getting back and asking for a cure there seems unlikely to work.
Re: Me an' Algernon – grappling with (temporary) cognitive decline
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
why not try to cure alzheimer or other mental diseases that show up on the elderly instead?
Are these mutually exclusive ideas? Can we not pursue research in this area while not forcing families to watch their loved ones slowly lose their mind and wither away?
It will be mutually exclusive along some class line if we try to pursue both. Additionally, without the desire to preserve life and value of the advantages of aged minds, we will not make as much progress on the disease.