Curiouser and curiouser.........no, this has nothing to do with Alice in Wonderland, just an article in the new issue of Scientific American Mind magazine, suggesting an educational "double-edged sword." (their words, not mine.) The article states that researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medecine at Yeshiva University (no, I don't know where that's located,) studied people with three years to more than 16 years of formal education and found that for every additional year of schooling people had, their memory declined 4 percent more quickly after the onset of dementia. "The researchers speculate that individuals with more education can unconsciously compensate as their brain changes with age, preventing the early symptoms of dementia from showing. Consequently, when the disease finally overwhelms the brain and sypmtoms become severe enough to warrant a diagnosis of dementia, the memory decline that follows is more rapid because the degeneration is at a later stage." Another article in the same issue suggests that a PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scan may be able to detect a chemical agent called Pittsburgh Compound-B, or PIB (Pittsburgh Compound.....a plaque so strong it will make you drop your Rolling Rock?)the accumulation of which, in studies performed thus far, seems to be a fairly accurate indicator of the onset of Alzhimer's Disease. Mental activity. Mental plaque. Care of the body and mind. I'd almost say I'm seeing a pattern here, although I'm not a neuroscientist. I contemplated the idea, too, that perhaps the hedonism of a great number of us, my father included, up to the 1960s and early 70s, left us blind to the wrongs we could do to ourselves. A rationale for conservativism? You betcha; but bigger than that is the tacit acceptance of at least a few limits. Apparently the mind is no more or less susceptible to wear and tear than any other part of the body. That fact that education might feed this does indeed make an odd kind of sense, at least to me. Not enough to make me stop wanting to educate myself, quite honestly, I'll take a little trade-off. It is interesting to think about what's coming in life, though; although, how could one truly know? It all stands in support of my theory that one should live every moment to it's fullest. If you're of a cosmic inclination, one would almost say that the indications stand as God's proof that man was never meant to know everything, for all time. We were given a store of knowledge by the Creator, and frankly, although I don't believe we're really anywhere near the bottom, none the less, I still think there are things in this world that are simply beyond our reach, in terms of understanding, and perhaps it should be thus; living to 80, or 90, or 150 is nothing really so much as a hypothetical in a lot of cases, and if those most-awful years are at the end, where's the payoff? Even Jack LaLanne is not the guy he was 40 years ago; do we all just have a given part to play, for a particular span of time, and that's that? There's a curious, if somewhat unruffling thought. One that Lewis Carroll would be proud of, perhaps.