Chip Walter's Blog: Childhood Is Why We Are the Last Ape Standing, page 4

Falling Behind

It's an irony that after a book you write actually finds its way to bookstores little time remains to write because you are too busy working to let everyone know the book exists! This is, of course, crucial to writers, but frustrating.

The result, I'm afraid, is that I have fallen behind in my blog posts here. On the other hand, people are learning more about the book. Readers here at Goodreads, the most sensible and insightful I have ever run across anywhere, have been very kind to Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived and written several positive reviews in just a few weeks. I am very grateful. Kirkus, Booklist and the New Yorker have also had very nice words. And the last time I checked nearly 1000 Goodreaders had Last Ape Standing on the their "to read," list.

I am going to have to get back to writing however, and hope here in the coming weeks to scribble a bit about the process of writing. If this is something you would like me to explore on this blog, please let me know. Drop me an email through Goodreads.

I will also soon begin travel and research for an amazing assignment at National Geographic magazine, a extended piece about the emergence of human creativity (which is touched upon in Last Ape Standing). Research for this will take me to South Africa, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Britain. Possibly Algeria as well. I plan to share dispatches from all of these far flung locations where scientists are exploring the roots of our creativity and self expression. If you'd like me to write about this here, please let me know.

And, of course, please share your thoughts with the Goodreads community about Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived, or any other books you enjoy. I'd love to hear what you think.

For more information about my writing and background, I hope you'll also visit www.chipwalter.com where I have stories about how I met some very interesting people over the years including William Shatner, Michael Keaton, Ray Kurzweil and Donald Johanson.

Thanks!

The Cure for Your Aging Brain?

Your brain isn’t getting any younger. You know that, right? It happens. And if you have an aging parent or grandparent, you have witnessed the sad results. Memory grows less sharp. Short term memory fades and in some cases disappears altogether as we age. Dementia sets in and eventually the most basic knowledge blips away. This is difficult enough to watch in those you love, but the prospect that the same awaits you down the road isn’t very encouraging either. It strikes terror into your heart every time you can’t seem to quite pluck the name of that actor that was in the–you know, the movie with the horse and the whip and the snakes–from what you fear is the darkening attic of your mind.

Now, though, there may be hope that science can slow or eliminate the loss of the brain’s remarkable ability to retrieve even the most useless information. Research described in Nature Neuroscience carried out by Ana M M Oliveira, Thekla J Hemstedt and Hilmar Bading link the aging brain’s decline with a parallel decline in methylation, a process that affects the regulation and expression of certain cerebral genes. A cure for repeatedly asking “Who are you, again?” may be near.

The scientists identified a specific gene, Dnmt3a2, related to methylation, and found that, in mice at least, it was expressed less often in the aging brains of elderly rodents as opposed to young ones. That seemed to indicate that aging and the expression of the gene, or lack of it, were connected. To test their theory, they used a virus to amp up the older mice’s Dnmt3a2, and low and behold they began to learn better and faster (shades of Charlie and “Flowers for Algernon”). Equally remarkable, when they reduced the expression of Dnmt3a2 in young mice, they began to perform, neurologically speaking, like elderly rodents on lab tests. If this happens in the brains of mice, some version of it very likely happens in human brains.

Bading thinks that as the methylation process, which allows for the expression of Dnmt3a2, slows with aging, and that creates a double whammy because it also reduces the ability of the brain to know, chemically, when the gene should be expressed in reaction to a need for increased concentration and memory. In other words, the brain loses its ability to not only recall, but to focus when it needs to log a memory in the first place, causing the brain to slowly spiral downward and lose its ability to stay sharp.

The $50 billion question, of course, is has the team found a potential cure for memory decline and dementia? They won’t go that far, but think that they might be onto to explaining at least a third of the reasons why our brains decline with age. It’s a start.

So don’t despair, or forget. Future research may yet lead to a cure for the question, “How old did you say you were again?”

By the way, how’s your memory doing? Share a comment below. And if you want to stay sharp, play the All Things Human “Answer This…” game at www.allthingshuman.net, or visit Lumosity.com.

Want to test your memory, try recalling the dialogue in this hilarious Danny Kaye movie scene word for word: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zIWcC...

For more about human nature, the brain and evolution, please also visit www.allthingshuman.net or www.chipwalter.com.

Goodreads

I'm relatively new to Goodreads, but happy to be on board! My first order of business is to thank the nearly 1000 people who entered the contest to win a preprint of my next book Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived. I'm very grateful!

Even if you didn't win, I hope you will seek the book out, give it a read and let me know what you think. I'm always looking for ways to improve, and always looking to discuss the fascinating question of how we came to be the remarkable creatures we are.

Check back here in the future for blog posts of all kinds (not just those that promote my writing :-). And please check out a site I launched three years ago which you may find interesting if you're as fascinated with human nature and behavior as I am: http://www.AllThingsHuman.net.

To see what others like Ray Kurzweil, William Shatner, Michael Keaton and Donald Johanson are saying about Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived (due out January 29, 2013), please visit http://www.chipwalter.com.