Should I Change How I Speak and Write?

I've read recently that psychologists have conducted research suggesting that people with deteriorating brains from Alzheimer's and other dementias exhibit telltale signs early on in the ways they speak and write. That is, they express themselves with diminishing sophistication in their syntax and resort to more concrete words and convey fewer abstract ideas. 

If neuropathology causes this degradation of language, I'm wondering if this unfortunate process might work both ways. That is, if a deteriorating brain causes deteriorating use of language, might deliberately simplifying one's syntax and using simpler and more concrete words cause the brain to deteriorate faster or in worse ways than it would otherwise?

I ask because I feel a growing urge to radically change the way I write and speak so that it's much simpler, clearer, and more succinct than it has been.

Of course, I want to continue addressing the generally abstract topics and issues that interest me most not only without oversimplifying them but by being more incisive than I ever have before. Yet, I wonder if this is even possible, and worse still, whether I might initiate my brain's precipitous decline.

I tell myself that the greater effort I'll need to make to speak and write the way I wish will preserve and maybe even strengthen my brain's verbal centers and my corresponding language fluency. I also plan to do even more focused and extensive reading in various subjects, to write more, and to even systematically expand my vocabulary. So, maybe my concerns are groundless.

But they're still my concerns.

The Mind as a Pair of Scissors

Jonah Lehrer, author of the delightful neuroscience blog The Frontal Cortex, posted an entry today about his new book How We Decide. This entry explains that the book examines the various factors that go into producing the various kinds of decisions we make including everything from choosing which flavor of Cheerios to buy at the supermarket to whether to take out a subprime mortgage.

In a Q&A section extracted from Amazon, Lehrer likens the mind to a pair of scissors. In this metaphor borrowed from Nobel Prize winning psychologist Herbert Simon, one blade of the scissors represents the brain and the other represents the brain's environment, and, just as we can't understand the operation of the scissors without understanding the simultaneous movement of both blades, so we can't understand the choices the mind makes without understanding the interaction of brain and environment.

In the comments section, this is what I wrote:

Jonah--
I look forward to reading your book, and, judging from Publisher's Weekly's starred review, you have nothing to be nervous about.

No doubt you address the free will vs determinism issue in your book. Herbert Simon's delightful metaphor of the brain and environment as the two blades of a pair of scissors reinforces my view that brain and environment are what the philosopher Alan Watts called a "unified field" and that the choices issuing from this field are the inevitable products of the conditions within it.

In other words, there is no freedom to choose other than what the conditions within the field produce, and there is also no determinism of something outside the field causing it to choose as it does, because, ultimately, the field encompasses everything of which there is nothing outside.

I do look forward to reading this book and to reviewing it here someday.

Consciousness After Death?

When a cat dies, does it have a soul or consciousness that continues to live? If so, is it a consciousness similar to what it had before it died--feline consciousness? Or after its soul or consciousness is no longer bound by a feline nervous system, does it become something else, something very different, something grander, richer, and vastly more expansive?

And the same questions hold for people. If we are conscious after our body dies and that consciousness is no longer connected to a functioning brain and body, is it a radically different and greater kind of consciousness than what we know in this life?

I've probably wondered this before, but never as vividly as I'm wondering it now. It seems to me that consciousness after death, unbounded by its biological and other limitations in this life, would have to be something far different than we experience in this life, something so different that it is virtually alien to our worldly experience. Yet most of us think of the afterlife as a continuation of consciousness largely as we know it. Maybe a little brighter and wiser, but essentially the same.

I don't know if Smokey's consciousness still lives in some realm of existence or what form it might take if it does. But I find myself hoping, in the grip of my sadness, that if he still lives, so will I after I die and that he and I will be together again.