Wouldn’t it be fun to have a personal historian assigned to you, someone to capture the significant details of your life? As it turns out, we each have several personal historians hitching a ride within our bodies. One of these personal historians is memory, the neurological mechanism that allows us to remember what has happened over time. The constancy of memory helps to shape our personalities, keeps us from entering dangerous situations, and encourages us…
Since my dad died 2 1/2 years ago, I’ve been paying especially close attention to the local obituaries. Perhaps because my dad died after having just turned 71, which seems much too young to my 48-year-old soul, I noticed that I was seeing an awful lot of deaths among the 40 to 60-year-old cohort, joining those who were over the age of 85. (It’s not uncommon to see people reach the high 90s or even…
I recently finished reading “10% Human: How Your Body’s Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness” by Alanna Collen. I have been keen to learn all I can about the human microbiome since developing a nasty case of eczema and food allergies as an adult. I have long suspected the antibiotics I took as a young woman (and the subsequent yeast infections) had something to do with what I’m experiencing now. In fact I…