Music and Dementia

 

                                                    We don’t stop playing because we grow old;                                                                 we grow old because we stop playing.                                                                      -  George Bernard Shaw

Does the music you enjoy indicate intellectual capacity?

Stereotypically, classical music is the favorite genre of the pretentious and intellectually elite. While this isn’t always true, research suggests that there might be a bit of truth to that stereotype. 

Two independent studies, conducted in Britain and Italy respectively, found that those who have greater intellectual function tend to correlate with liking classical music. In the British study, doctors found that musical tastes changed as patients lost brainpower to dementia, with some who had previously loved classical music turning away from it in favor of pop. The Italian study produced almost identical results, with complete turnarounds in musical tastes as gray matter in the brain was damaged or diminished.

This isn’t to say that all pop fans are mentally incompetent or lack smarts, researchers from both studies were quick to assert, only that it appears to take more brain power to be able to appreciate classical music. 

I find this interesting but still love listening to everything from Green Day to Artie Shaw and the 3 B's, and Eddie Vedder to Mel Carter. 
 

A Lady In Pants

 Stories from the Carsonville Hills

My great grandmother had dementia. She lived in the back of her son’s house but had her own room and a sitting room. Mother remembers riding in the horse-drawn sleigh across the snow-packed roads to her uncle’s house and seeing her grandmother drift mysteriously through the living room. Though she often didn't know where she was or who she was with, in other matters, nothing escaped her. 

Women had just started wearing pants, and great-grandmother frowned on that. She’d look askance at a lady in pants and cast that disapproval mother’s way who, upon this occasion, had dared don a functionable pair of trousers with pockets for the ride through the snow. 

In great-grandmother's day women sat stern with reddened hands, legs together, baked bread in their house dress, milked cows in their barn dress, and herded the children to bed in their nightdress.

Mother was on the cusp of attending Marygrove College in Detroit. A woman on the move who dressed smart but sometimes wore pants.

Sharing this little story (prose poem?) with Desperate Poets (something desperately different) and Poets and Storytellers United.  The prompt is Triumph or Disaster. I look at this as a triumph for my mother given the times. But we woman are still fighting for decent pockets in everything!!