Comment by iwalton3
11 hours ago
I have a kind of outlandish hypothesis that needs more research before it can be taken seriously, but it basically says that the cause and effect are backwards. Mental atrophy due to less learning/thinking, isolation, loss of meaning and purpose happens first. The sleep down regulation and decay of mental circuitry comes after. Would explain why treating the physical symptoms doesn't work.
Protective against the problem is anything which keeps you mentally active, such as socialization, work, religious community participation, hobbies, and meditation. Retirement, death of partner, isolation, sleep deprivation, depression, dissociation, psychosis, medications/drugs which interfere with restful sleep increase risk.
A possible falsification of this hypothesis would be if it's caused by inactivity or physical self neglect, as those often go hand in hand with the correlated and anti-correlated factors mentioned above.
This is particularly interesting:
> Intriguingly, studies show conscientiousness and neuroticism to be associated with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias but not with their pathologic hallmarks such as plaques, tangles, infarcts or Lewy bodies in the brain.
> Mental atrophy due to less learning/thinking, isolation, loss of meaning and purpose happens first.
Except early onset Alzheimers happens and it also happens to plenty of people for which none of those are true.
Exactly. My mom lost her job because of early onset. She was very social, read tons of books, etc…. Now, I’m happy she at least still knows who am, but she can’t put a sentence together.
Example: Claude Shannon
This isn’t a hypothesis, it’s a wild unsubstantiated guess