Read On Pluto for Free Online Page A

energy-consuming part of the body; it represents about two percent of the body’s weight, but has the raw computer power of more than 16 billion times the number of people on Earth. Without sufficient brain power, some suggest, we’re like astronauts on a space walk whose lifeline has just been cut. We drift to the ends of the universe. Out beyond, to Pluto.
    Boomers will drift, facing an unimaginable epidemic of Alzheimer’s and related dementias, in projected numbers seven times greater than cancer or heart disease, whose critical research and funding starkly outpaces Alzheimer’s tenfold. There are an estimated 35 million people worldwide today diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or a related dementia, an estimated five million in the U.S. afflicted with Alzheimer’s, and predictions of up to 13.8 million Americans diagnosed with the disease by 2050. [ λ ]
    Researchers suggest new ways of combating the disease. Alzheimer’s in the making must be stopped long before it damages the brain, doctors say. Research shows that once an individual begins to lose synapse (the brain structure allowing a neuron, a nerve cell, to pass an electrical or chemical signal to another cell), and once neurons are lost, the brain cannot recover. Alzheimer’s starts long before symptoms are apparent to others, perhaps ten or more years earlier, and if diagnosed early and treated with medications before loss of synapse, the progression may be slowed, although it cannot be stopped, as doctors are learning.
    Part of living with Alzheimer’s and slowing the progression is in the daily training regimen to accelerate synapse. Consider the jaggy dendrite we learned about in high school biology—a spine or tree-like projection of a neuron that passes signals to other brain cells. Exercising the brain, experts say, builds new dendrites, pathways that create alternate routes for synapse that can help one function with Alzheimer’s for longer periods, while other neurons are dying off. In short, I believe, one can re-circuit the brain to receive and transmit information, staving off, for a time, some of the more horrific symptoms of this disease. But in the end, the neurons go dead.
    This is the place I find myself today, pushing back daily against a loss of synapse that is progressing, as neurons go dead. The challenge with public perception of Alzheimer’s is that few want to embrace the disease, take it seriously, at least not until a family member or close friend is found in a nursing home sleeping in urine and talking to the walls. Public awareness of this disease, a balance between science, medicine, and faith, needs to change dramatically in anticipation of an Alzheimer’s epidemic for Baby Boomers and others to come. In a snapshot, Alzheimer’s is not the stereotypical end stage; it is the journey from the diagnosis to the grave.
    There is an upside: you can get out of jury duty in a New York minute!
    ****
    Does loss of brain function render loss of self; can we thrive in spiritual terms when the mind begins to fail? While the brain can be dissected, the soul is far more elusive, a place where sparks can miraculously shine through dysfunction. The balance between science and religion constitutes the essence of life, as we all struggle with this. “Death is not extinguishing the light. It is putting out the lamp before the dawn has come,” wrote Rabindranath Tagore, a noted 19 th century Bengali poet, philosopher, and thinker, the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore and Einstein, among the brightest minds of the last millennium, both wrestled with concepts of the mind, life, death, and beyond: can the essence of a person survive without full function of the brain? It is a question probed daily by experts in the field of Alzheimer’s, other forms of dementia, autism, and a range of brain disorders. It is a question for which those with Alzheimer’s seek an