Aging & Your Brain How am I Doing A Memory Center Charlotte Symposium

Today we're going to talk about time. We're going to talk about the markings of time, the evidence of time, and the ravages of time in the human brain. Time affects every thought that we have, every perception, and ultimately our behavior. And so we have to understand how it affects us. There's some of it's going to be easy, some of it's going to be a little bit scientific. I want you to stick with me because I think at the end you'll see that it'll be worthwhile. My goals for today: one is I'm going to try to convince you that the human brain is affected by time. Okay. And then I'm going to try to show you what areas are affected and how those areas affect our behavior. The third thing we're going to do is, does anyone escape that? Is there anyone that kind of gets away with the time, the ravages of time? And then we're going to look at specifically what their brains look like so we can learn from them. And the fourth thing we're going to do is talk about What do I do now? Okay? It's a survival manual for the aging brain. Okay? We're going to start with the Brown Sisters. Okay? This is the beginning. I don't know if you've seen on the web, but these are 4 sisters that are photographed each year in the same order for 40 years. OK? And I become extremely captivated, I guess is the word, by the Brown sisters. Here they are in 1975, 1981, '82, '91, '97, 99. Focus on the effects of time on them. Okay, notice that there are times where 2 of them will be hugging. There'll be one that will have a, a sort of a, a mood change. Look at the changes that have affected their, um, their, their eyes, their skin, their body habitus. There's 2011, and there's 2017. I love, I love them more as they age, but who can look at these photographs and see the effect that time has on our exterior appearance and not think that it has effects on our brains. There's no way that our brains can be preserved, can they? Well, on the right-hand side of this slide are times in 50-yard dash, 100-yard dash, 220, 440, and notice that physical decline right there on the left. It goes straight down. When you're 90 years old, you're not going to be running too fast. Okay. Here's the sad part. On the right-hand side is testing. Testing for matrices, testing for math, testing for patterns. Every single test that we can give for cognitive decline, we go down on. What age do you think that we peak In fluid intelligence. We're going to talk a little bit about that. So there are only 2 things that go up on that slide. One is vocabulary, and the second— go figure this— antonyms, which is a form of vocabulary, the opposite of words. So I'm going to give you a little bit of a primer here. There's a guy named John Horn, and he, in his PhD thesis, he came up with this concept that really strikes Really strikes me because it helps me understand how things evolve and unfold. And he came up with fluid versus crystallized intelligence. Okay? On the left is Albert Einstein just about the time that he came up with the specific theory of relativity. I was just talking to Eris, and you can look up Einstein's brain, and apparently he's got a bunch of extra places on his brain that we don't have. We already knew that. But fluid intelligence, okay, fluid intelligence is the intelligence that we test. That's our IQ. All right, it is what we use to solve problems without the use of our history about what's happened to us. Specifically, it's de novo. You're not able, in the neuropsychological testing, to use past experiences. They don't matter. We peak at about somewhere between 25 and 30 years old. Now that's hard to believe. That means that my 40-year-old son is getting— is a lot smarter than I am. And I know that's not true. Okay? I know that's not true. Okay. So here's Einstein on the right. Much older man, just before he died. This is the one that came up with the great statement when they, they were talking to him about electrons and where they were. And Heisenberg said, you can't, you can't predict where or how fast an electron is going. It's totally chaotic. And he said, God doesn't roll dice. There has to be a pattern to it. This is crystallized intelligence. It is what we do in our lifetime solving problems using the history or our experiences. And we actually do get smarter in that. So one of the things we're going to do today is we're going to try to explore how we use that wisdom in our brain to tackle, identify, and then address the shortcomings of how fluid intelligence is going straight down the tube. OK. Because if it was just fluid intelligence that we're going to live longer and we're getting stupider, that's not really fair, is it? OK. OK. So we're going to talk on the right-hand side of the— on the left-hand side of the slide is a picture of a Neanderthal skull. And you notice in the front it is flat. OK. And the one on the right is our skull. That's a modern-day skull. And notice how It's etched out, it's pooched out in the front. And what occupies that place is what's called the prefrontal cortex. The frontal cortex, the prefrontal cortex, it's where we're civilized. Teenagers do not have a prefrontal cortex. Okay, they just don't have one. It just kind of tells you everything about it. And this guy, John Grafman, says the prefrontal cortex is the crowning achievement of the human brain. Okay? And it's still a work in progress. Why it's still a work in progress is because as we get smarter, or as this develops, we're more able to procreate and to survive. So it's got an evolutionary advantage. So what the prefrontal cortex does It's the center of intelligence. It's where we solve problems. It's where we assess risk. Very important. Every month in the clinic, we will have patients come, families come, and their loved one has been suffering from some frontal temporal problems, and they will have made these egregious mistakes. in trying to, uh, still manage their finances. It's where long-term memories are. That makes a lot of sense because remember, short-term memories in Alzheimer's disease go. But you can ask any woman that has Alzheimer's, what's the name of the first boy you ever kissed? She's got it right on, right there. She can tell you exactly who that is. Sometimes she won't because her husband's sitting there. We're going to talk a little bit more about multitasking. And I'll bring that up later. And then this is the frontal lobe is where we control our inhibitions or we control our impulses. And that this is where we're civilized. We know not to say certain things. We know where we get out of social boundaries. And when our patients have frontal lobe issues, Things can get out of hand. And this also, on the right-hand side, is where creativity comes from, being able to sort of think about things on your own. This is where self-awareness is. So this is a pretty important place. Unfortunately, the place that is affected the most, the most important part of our brain, the place that is affected the most, is the prefrontal cortex. All right? It shrinks up to the time we're 65 years old, sometimes 10 to 15%. Wow, that's not really fair. What? Wait, wait, that can't be true. Okay, so how does this affect us as we age? There are certain things that are definitely predictable. Okay, and the reason why we need to know them is because if we do know them, We're not going to worry about that effect. You're going to say to yourself, oh my gosh, I'm really slow these days. Ah, that's what Chuck was talking about. I'm okay. Got any of this? I had this good friend and he called me one day. He said, I got to come over. He said, I, I think I'm losing it. And I said, well, what happened? He said, well, 3 things. One was that my wife about 2 nights ago and went down to get some ice cream. And I left the refrigerator door open. So the next morning my wife came down and said, what in the world? You left the refrigerator— women are big on the refrigerator. Okay. Close the door. Close the door. I know. So, um, he said, I didn't care about that. The next night I did the exact same thing. Then he said, I went to play golf that afternoon. And I played with the same foursome for 25 years. Every Wednesday afternoon we play together. And 2 of the members, uh, 2 of the members of my foursome, I couldn't remember their names. They're my friends. I had to go to their golf bag and look at the tag to see who they were. He said, I'm losing it. I am losing it. He said, Chuck, you got any medicine or anything? So we tested him. He tested out perfect. Wasn't anything wrong with him. Okay. So one thing in our evaluation of things, I don't care about names. Okay. I don't care about names. Some people are good at names, but I have patients that will come to me and say, Dr. Edwards, I can't remember anybody's name. And I said, well, you've always been good at names. No, I've never been able to remember anybody's name. So Go figure that. Episodes do interest me. If you're talking to your husband and you say, wasn't it great to be with the Joneses? And wasn't that a great evening last night? He says, I don't remember it. Then Eros is going to talk to that. So as we age, we have difficulty focusing. Okay? The second thing is that we're much more easily distracted, and we're going to talk about why that is. The third thing is, and this is really important, and again, we're going to develop this theme a little bit, but the frontal lobe is where we risk, where we understand risk. And risk is very— it's different ways. It's not all financial risk. It's risking intellectual pursuit or an intellectual answer, or how can I solve a problem in a novel way? And as we age, we don't want to go through that anxiety, and we shut down, and we keep going to the same old answers to vexing problems that don't work because we're trying to avoid anxiety. So creative, creative solutions go. So if we're aware of that, and you're presented with 2 or 3 options, and your children are looking, Don't be afraid to go with the one that's the most bold. Another thing that we don't do very well is read the intention of others. As we age, sometimes we can become a little bit self-absorbed. This is part of the aging process. In pure frontal temporal dementia, when the frontal lobe doesn't work at all, the patients are totally Absorbed with themselves. They have what's called emotional blunting, which actually is the place, the loss of the ability to love. So as the frontal lobe gets a little bit shrinkage in it, we have to understand that we have to actively think about other people and connecting with them. What's their situation? Not just mine, but theirs. We slow down. And this is really important because when we slow down, we start to doubt ourselves. You'll be with your children and they've got it. They've got it. And you're sitting there thinking, what'd he say? Wait, what? And so it's okay to understand that I'm gonna, I'm gonna process things just a little bit slower than say my 40-year-old son who thinks he's the smartest man on the world. And In the world. Also notice that there are no 65-year-old Navy SEALs. Okay? They just don't exist, partly because of physical, but we have a tendency to back off of things that are unpleasant. Okay? We don't want to endure pain. When we're exercising, it used to be that you would go and you would go hard and you'd want it to hurt a little bit and want to have that tachycardia and want to be out of breath. And now you go and you say, boy, I hope this guy's not going to work me too hard today. I'd like to slip by this. So we lose the ability to assume hardship, and it changes our decisions. Okay, and we'll talk a little bit about that. Technology— think about this. We established that we are going down, declining in fluid intelligence. Fluid intelligence is not using our experiences, but it's de novo. You got to figure it out without any— without a map, without any clues. Where— that's technology. Who— where was an iPad when we were in college? Where was a computer? And so technology brings tremendous anxiety. It also has changed aging. Uh, I gave a talk the other day and I used this, um, example. My grandfather, um, was a, um, an interesting man. Uh, he was a kind of a larger-than-life character. He would walk in this room and everybody would have been able to see him. He wore Panama hats and two-tone seersucker suits. suits and those two-tone shoes. He was kind of a dandy. He probably didn't finish the 8th grade. Um, he lived in— he was born in South Boston, Massachusetts, in a very ethnic Irish background. I know he couldn't read a map because they used to take us on vacation and I was responsible for getting us where we were going to go when I was like 8 years old. Um, so Um, but he was an object of this tremendous respect for us, my brother and I. He would take us on these, um, vacations, and we would always end up in a Civil War battlefield. And he would tell us these great stories about the, the Union's coming here, and the rebels were here, and there were dead bodies laying all over it. And my brother started reading the markers, and we realized, Grampy, this is a Revolutionary War battlefield. This isn't even a Civil War battlefield. But he was this object. Everything he said, I can almost remember the words. My grandchildren, they look at me in part of this, probably some respect, and they're probably, oh my God, here comes another lecture. But they look at me as if I'm not as good on this computer or on this screen as they are. There's a basic change in how technologies change us. So the reason why we struggle with technology is because it's totally fluid. We've got no historical experience with it. And we also have anxiety with it because we know we're going to get into trouble. At least I would. And what I do, I have this great technique. If I get frustrated, all I do is say, Mary, come here. You've got to help me. The 2 major deficits that we have As we age, though, and this is really important, is inability to multitask. Think about this. There's a young mother. She's at the stove and she is cooking dinner. She's got 3 or 4 children underneath her feet, and she's talking to her mother-in-law on the phone. She's 28 years old. She's doing all 3 of those things at the top of her intelligence. She has it. If the child gets a little bit off, she'll— she won't even take the phone. She'll be talking, she'll move it away, she'll move a handle. She can do all those 3 things equally well. As we age, we can't do that anymore. That scratch pad that is working intelligence doesn't work. We can do 1 or we can do 2, but we're not going to be able to do 3 or 4 things. We just have to know that. In order to adjust to it. And the last thing is that we become— the brain has this magic way of automatically focusing in us. And when we lose that ability, inhibition, if we become disinhibited, we can't filter out things anymore. We can't triage. We can't say, okay, wait a minute, I think this is more important than this. So our ability to inhibit and to take all the background noise away and be able to focus and be able to evaluate goes down. So we have to understand that about ourselves, that— and we'll talk about how that works. Does anyone Get away from this. Are there any SuperAgers? Well, I'll tell you, I can look out in my— I see a couple of SuperAgers out here. SuperAgers are defined as people in their 70s and 80s who test like they're in their 20s. When we image their brains, they don't have as many plaques and tangles, and they also— They also, when you test them neuropsychologically, if you give them 14 words to remember for 10 minutes, they'll come back with 10 of them. OK? And you say, well, that's great for them. What difference does it make to us? What difference does it make? Well, when we image their brains, there is one place that is almost always larger And it's called the anterior cingulate cortex. Okay? It is dramatically larger in SuperAgers. What does it do? It's where attention is. It's where I want to remember this or I've got this. Second thing, it's being self-aware and how you fit in to the context of the world. If you have a stroke in the anterior cingulate gyrus or anterior cingulate cortex, you lose the ability to make contact with people. You become passive and you become mute. The third thing is, and this is really important because it's been selected for, the intention of others, their awareness, what they need, what they want. This has been programmed in us because if we're going to survive, And there was a bad guy out there and we didn't read that that was a bad guy, we're going to get killed. So we've constantly selected for learning, reading the intention of others. Being able to detect errors. Very important because when you're going to do something and you are doing it and you no longer can detect errors, then you are going to make errors and then you're going to feel worse about yourself. So this is where you double-check things. I have several super agers and they always want to be tested. They know they're super agers and they'll call the office and say, I would like Dr. Edwards to test me so I can feel better about myself than I did before. Okay. And they always come in and I have a couple of women that will not, they will not let me not test them. One of the women, I operated on her husband several times and I ended up operating on her, I think. And one day she called the office and she said, I want to speak to Dr. Edwards right away. And they said, Dr. Edwards is in the mountains right now. Can he call you back Monday? She said, I paid for that mountain house. He needs to call me today. SuperAgers have emotional control. They're not going to go off and do something rash Because it gets you killed in certain times. So if they're going to be super agers and they're going to survive, these are survival markers. All right. And this is the magic one. André Malraux, the French philosopher, wrote, the value of a man— sorry about the sexist thing, I'm old school, but— and he wrote it, so blame him. The value of a man is in that area between thought and action, which is will. That's where we think we want to do something, but then because the inhibition has— the disinhibitions come and we create all of these reasons why we can't do it. I would really like to paint, or when I was in high school, I was a really good poet and I want to do that. And then you say, well, that's going to be a lot of trouble. SuperAgers, they go plowing right through that. No trouble. I'm going to do it. I want to do it. I'm going to make it happen. This is a survival manual for the aging brain. What do we do to sort of compensate for the things that have gone awry or that are declining? I want to explain to you how the brain memory works. There are 2 Factors to it. One is the file clerk. The file clerk is the part of your brain that says, I want to remember this. This is important. I got to get this. I got to get this. SuperAgers, unbelievable on the file clerk part. Well, one thing I didn't finish up on the SuperAgers, I apologize. You would say to yourself, what does it matter? I think it's great that those people are really smart and they're doing it, but what's that got to do with me? Well, why would I care about these people that are only 5% of the population? It's got nothing to me. I'm struggling with trying to, you know, use my iPhone. Well, if we understand what SuperAgers have on us by genetics, if those characteristics preserve our brains, then we need to learn from them. And we need to be able to actively incorporate those things into ourselves. Okay, so memory. The file clerk. That's the person that says, I need to remember this, I want to remember it. And then you've got the file cabinet. That's the part of your brain where you store a short-term memory, which is called hippocampus. In Alzheimer's disease, the hippocampus is gone. And so there's no file cabinet anymore. But most of the time with normal cognitive aging, what we're experiencing is that our file clerk needs to be fired because they're not paying attention. They're not focusing. They are not processing. Okay? So what we can do is to make our file clerk— Do much better. We're going to talk a little bit about that. Okay? So the one thing that we can do, and we're going to learn from SuperAgers, is we're going to pay attention. We are going to be more aware of our surroundings. We're going to be more aware of the intention of others, more aware of the needs of others. Okay? Okay. So we're trying to solve a task. We're going to do our taxes. Taxes are— was the first time that I realized my dad was losing it is 2 things. One, we were watching my youngest daughter Leslie's basketball game. And he turned to me and he said, Chuck, who's my son, is not getting a lot of playing time. And I looked at him and I said, oh my God, here we go. Girls basketball game and he's expecting my son to play. Um, and the second was he was always so fastidious about things. He always felt like that he had faith in the system and he wanted to do things right. And his taxes, he had a file cabinet, '85, '86, '87, '88. They were all there and it would be in the special order. And he calls me like in about 1993, said, Chuck, I, I need some help with my taxes. I said, okay, Dad, I'm not so sure I'm the guy. So I went over there and we took the files out. This is 1993. '92 is not there. '91 is not there. '90 is not there. We're in a little bit of trouble. And so after he died, the IRS called me and said, I want you to make this up. I said, I'll get back to y'all. I'll get right back to y'all. I'll call y'all back. So the task at hand, how— what can we do to make ourselves more effective? One is work shorter intervals. OK? We're going to get tired. And so if our idea is to have a task, instead of saying, I'm going to take this whole thing on, I'm going to work till I get tired, I'm going to do this for 20 minutes. And then I'm going to go get a shot of Jack Daniel's or tea or whatever it is. It doesn't matter. OK. Set specific goals. Have it so that That I'm going to just get one thing done today, but I have to get that done. I am not going to allow my disinhibited brain to give me excuses. I'm going to use will, but I am going to only do one thing, but I'm going to get that done. Multitasking. We're not going to throw 3 or 4 balls up in the air. We're going to throw one and we're going to react to that. Error identification, realizing that we don't see the errors like we used to, so therefore we're going to go back and check. Just let me check this. Or as a team, husband and wife, come and check this, make sure I'm doing this right, instead of being defensive and saying, I got this. Understanding our challenges with technology, that we start to get frustrated. Anxiety and anger doesn't really help. Okay? Wanting to throw it out the window, this $700 iPad, is not the answer. It is, let me just calm down, like SuperAgers, no emotion, and see if I can work through this. Don't be afraid of doing new things to solve old problems. Very important because we get anxious. And we'll have a lot of young people around, and here's the quote. They don't know what the hell they're talking about. They haven't experienced anything. OK? Well, I got the crystallized intelligence. Let's see what fluid intelligence has to say, and then we'll combine the two. We might come up with something. And here— this is really important. A lot of guys were terrific at certain things in their life. I'll use golf as a metaphor. That— I had one patient that was a scratch golfer. He had won the South Carolina— Championship. Amateur several times. And I asked him, I said, how's your golf game? I'm so damn bad, I don't even play anymore. I said, well, now what do you do with the time that you used to play golf? Well, I like to watch Fox News. That helps. Or MSNBC. It's all the same. They're trying to control your mind. So I said, well, that's a shame. That— what about your buddies that you used to play with? Well, I, I just don't want them. I don't want to even see them. I don't want them to see me because I'm no good anymore. As we age, we have to accept the fact that we are not going to be good at things that we get enjoyment from. And one of the most profound responses that I have in the clinic is what's called anhedonia. Okay, anhedonia, the loss of pleasure from things that used to give you pleasure. Very sad. We have to realize that we're not going to be good at things. I might not be quite the seamstress I was. I might not be as good a painter as I was, but it's not about them. It's about me, about what I want this time to look like. Anxiety is something that has been selected for, for millions of years. Okay. I, I say it's that hummingbird that gets inside your chest, and it's that feeling that, you know what, I'm not comfortable here, something's not right. We all have it because it's been a marker for survival. If you are nervous and afraid and anxious, you're not going out at night to get eaten by a mammoth, or you're not going to get too close to a raging river that's going to Wash you away because you're back, you're timid. So we've selected for it. So all of us have a lot more anxiety than our ancestors did a million years ago. Now it's turned on us. It's turned on us, and it is a marker for a shorter life and not being able to have joy in certain moments. How is it manifested? It's manifested by impatience. What impatience is, is I don't like this minute. I can hardly wait for the next minute. I want— I don't like what's going on now, but maybe it'll be better tomorrow or later on this afternoon. Well, unfortunately, this minute now is the only one that you can give and receive love, that you can be joyful. And so the anxiety takes our lives and pushes it out, and we miss everything. Not being able to connect with your children. Okay, anxiety is also what we said, anhedonia. But it's very important for us to realize how anxiety affects us because it prevents us from getting that peace that we want so dramatically. And also, all of us have had traumatic experiences in life. Things that have happened that as we age, we would like to get some resolution, some peace from it. So we have to work through things, and you'll think about them. As soon as you get near one of those thoughts of bad things that's happened, you have to realize that you're going to get so much anxiety that you have to work through that in order to get the peace that you want. So understanding that this anxiety is not weakness. It's been put there. It's not weakness, but we have to be able to manage it. OK. All right, last thing. How can I prevent myself from going from normal cognitive aging to what Dr. Chaconis is going to talk about, which is mild cognitive impairment and dementia? The first thing is exercise. Lots of books written, and I know everybody's so tired of this. There's a couple of things though that's happened with exercise that is very off-putting, I'll say. One is that people have— one of the biggest misconceptions is that if I can't go to the gym and pump a bunch of iron and do a lot of exercise, that anything I do doesn't matter. It's exactly the opposite. If you take a walk, I don't care if it's a quarter of a mile, half a mile, any type of exercise is beneficial. Okay? Also, in our society, the person with the worst obsessive-compulsive disorder sets the agenda until challenged. Okay? So what happens is that you get pumped up and you go and you run a 5K. Or walk a 5K, I don't care. And you're getting in the car and all of a sudden some guy drives up and he's got 10K written on, he's got that sticker, okay? And so then you say, okay, I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna do a 10K. I'm gonna show that guy. And then he pulls up and he's got a 12.5K. Well, what's happened is we've allowed other people's sort of unrealistic goals or the most obnoxious, competitive people to set the agenda so the rest of us says, we don't want to do it. You go ahead and kill yourself, but I'm not going to do it. Okay, but exercise— every time we exercise, there's a substance that's generated called BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor. And if you take that factor and you isolate it and you put it on brain cells and dip it, the brain cells get luscious. They get And they start to interdigitate. It is Miracle-Gro for our brains. Okay? The second thing is social connectivity. There's a famous study called the Nun Study, and a group of nuns in La Crosse, Wisconsin donated their brains to science. And they had a pattern of their social connectivity And then they also autopsied them. And when they autopsied them, the thing that they found out was that several of the nuns had developed full-blown dementia, and they had Alzheimer's disease, and they had plaques and tangles all over their brain. There was another group of nuns who were sort of the ones that were the most gregarious, that had family members, and they were— they had a real social connectivity. In fact, they actually measured at something like 8 significant relationships in their life as opposed to 1 or 2. But when they autopsied those women, they found that the ones that did not have Alzheimer's disease had the same amount of plaques and tangles as the one that did. The only difference was the social connectivity. A quick story. My friend Fred Bonson, who went to medical school with me, his grandfather was in a He was in a train station in Bozeman, Montana one morning, and he was sitting at a table and he was having breakfast. There was no one else in the train station except for one man having breakfast across the way. And about halfway through breakfast, this guy comes up to him and says, I have to tell you, I hate to eat alone. Do you mind if I sat down and we had breakfast together? And the man said, no, I would welcome that. He said, hi, my name is Will Rogers. At that time, Will Rogers was the most recognizable man on the planet. He wasn't a celebrity that didn't want to be talked to. That's what we're looking for, that connection. Okay? Again, being aware of others, touching their lives, having them touch your life, that's Miracle-Gro for the brain also. Third thing is If you realize that— we realize that education is somewhat protective against Alzheimer's disease, that if someone has not graduated from high school, then they would have a higher incidence of dementia as opposed to someone that went to college or graduate school. I think this is overblown because I don't think education— I can't believe 4 years in Chapel Hill is going to protect you from anything. No. But new knowledge. And that new knowledge is not for us. It's not positscience.com or Lumosity. Those little dots going back and forth, maybe for our children, but not for us. Okay? This is where we want to know more about— maybe take a course. Take a course painting. Literature, the Normandy Invasion, but trying to dominate a certain amount of information, that's where the channels are best utilized. The number one marker for the development of Alzheimer's disease is hearing loss. I'm going to say that again. The number one marker for the development of Alzheimer's disease is hearing loss. So if you are having a little trouble hearing, if you correct the hearing, you go back to the normal aging slope. Okay, last thing, PTSD, post-traumatic stress. What it means is that you've had a traumatic experience in your life and it has changed your brain chemistry forever. Okay? Forever. And it can come back. Reassert itself. Now, if that's true, then reverse PTSD can also work. Okay? If you have positive thoughts and a positive attitude, it will generate positive actions, and it will generate more positive thoughts, and you go down this road. Okay? Negative thoughts. I use the example of you're driving to work, or you're driving, and in front of you is a little man, and you can just barely see his bald head above the seat, okay? And he's going along, he's going about 20 miles an hour, and you're a little late. You're supposed to— you got up late, and you're— and so you've got 2 choices here. The guy looks tentative. He doesn't know really where he's going or— You can say, look at that guy. He doesn't know where he is or what he's doing. He doesn't need to be driving. You hit the horn. You fly around him. You give him a digital sign. And you're off. OK? The rest of the day, you're going to have those negative thoughts. Your day is going to be set by the fact that you were sort of insensitive to that. If you hang back and said, gosh, you know, maybe this guy's having a heart attack. Or what if he goes— What if he goes off the road? Let me just stay here for a second. Then all of a sudden you see he turns into his driveway, but you've generated a positive thought. And this has been shown that people with positive attitudes live longer and their brains work better than people with negative attitudes. So to sum up, what we're trying to do is to try to take what wisdom we have been given And turn it on what the normal decline in our brains are. And that awareness will allow us to be more effective, more joyful, and protect us hopefully from getting dementia. Okay, thank you.