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Comment by fairity | Hacker News Reader

Too many of us are attached to our intelligence. I love this story bc it's a reminder that we should value personal excellence over intelligence. By personal excellence I mean making the most of the intelligence you’re given.

The arc of intelligence in Flowers of Algernon is the same arc we’ll all experience over our lifetime. With old age, we all lose our mental faculties. If we value intelligence, in and of itself, that loss will be very painful. But, if we value making the most of our intelligence, we are resilient.

Applying this framework to Charlie, there’s much less to be sad about. He made the most of the intelligence he was gifted, and that’s what really matters.

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> Too many of us are attached to our intelligence

I think Alzheimer's is scary because it's not just about intelligence. If it was just that you become dumb(er), I wouldn't mind it that much. I must be an exception, but beyond a certain threshold (I wouldn't want to be drooling idiot) I'm not that attached to my intelligence. I'm painfully aware that I'm average and that I had the luck of having an education and a stable home that other, more intelligent but less fortunate people than me, didn't.

I think Alzheimer's is scary because your whole personality goes. Cognitive functions. Memory. You stop being independent. You cannot do the simplest things by yourself. Things become scary and you're not sure why. You are alone, surrounded by strangers.

If there was a progressive illness where you got less intelligent, but still able to function and tell who your loved ones are, remember things, and at least understand where you are and your new place in the world, to me it wouldn't be half as scary as Alzheimer's.

I can corroborate your insight from personal experience. I had a stroke a few years back and, while I was recovering, my intelligence was drastically reduced. I always derived a great deal of my identity and self-worth from being "smart", and would have predicted that operating at maybe 25% capacity would be devastating. In fact, it wasn't. I was aware (certainly!) that I was operating at a deficit, but I still felt like myself. I was able to love and feel loved, experience joy, and humour, and enjoy good food, and watch movies and sports on TV. About all I couldn't do was read (well, I could read, but I couldn't follow complex prose), which sucked, but nearly all of what made me me, and made life worth living, was unaffected. Intelligence is overrated.

Your description of dementia, however, is only true from the outside. Prior to that stage, I passed through a period of about a week where I was completely absent. I was able to behave coherently for short periods of time, but I wasn't creating any memories. It's a blank. (I have text threads saved with friends where I tell them what's happened and where I was, carry on for a bit, and then loop back to the beginning.) If identity is a pattern both stable and self-modifying over time - which, based on this experience, I believe it to be - then I had ceased exist.

I've made an agreement with my wife that, should I become demented in old age, she should feel no moral compulsion towards any course of action. She's welcome to keep whatever is left of me around so long as it gives her joy, but "I" will no longer be present, and whatever happens to whatever is left no longer matters. As far as I'm concerned she should warehouse, or (better, though unfortunately not legal where we live) euthanase my body, and get on with doing something useful with her time.

Thanks for sharing your experience. I hope you fully recovered.

Thanks for the kind wishes. I have some residual neuropathy in my right hand, and I have to take anti-seizure medication every day or my brain tries to kill me. Either the medication or the brain injury has reduced my brain-power and ability to articulate my thoughts by about 10%. There are some things that were easy before that aren't possible now, but all in all I've had an amazing result. The experience has entirely removed my fear of death, so it may even have have been a net positive. I can't complain!

As another reply has stated, losing some intelligence is not so terrifying.

Alzheimer's is. I've seen it up close over its course twice. It's as bad as people imagine. You never forget the sound of someone drowning in their own saliva.

So sad and terrifying.

I came across this song recently about losing someone to Alzheimer's.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ci5hfiIM5KY

Well said. The more I read and attempt to understand LLM and AI the more interesting the parallels to the human mind. Our conscience mind is similar to a model and weights are applied in the training of our model in a variety of ways. Parents, school, environment, illness, books, video games , relationships, religion, etc all work to help fine tune our model and in essence develop our presented conscience self (well maybe … ). Breaking down of the neurons leads to the model itself breaking down and the conscience person we know is lost.

Perhaps there is more than us than just our conscience personality and the essence that vibes with the larger pattern of life and reality itself is more than our little personalized highly tuned version of “me”.

Interesting times to be alive for sure.

> With old age, we all lose our mental faculties.

What? No. That is not at all true. Nearly all of my relatives - other than the one who had alzheimers - were as sharp as ever up until they died.

> With old age, we all lose our mental faculties.

Citation needed

AFAIK it's not remotely true that "we all lose our mental faculties". Plenty of people do not

I thought it was well understood that your mental/physical potential peak when you are young and degrade thereafter? E.G. comparing 26 year old self to 86 year old self.

But a saving grace is the degradation can be combated with exercise both mental/physical.

I am not sure how much of aging is understood, so I hesitate to mention stuff like DNA damage.

I think that's a total misconception. I think the myth that "the brain stops developing at 25" was an apocryphal conclusion from a study where they simply stopped measuring past 25 and that either the same study or other studies found many brain faculties don't plateau, ever, even in advanced age. I also heard that it's highly variable from person to person how the brain develops, like some 8-year-olds had faster development in some regions than some 30-year-olds.

One thing's for sure though: we're still in the stone age of neurology.

so primitive. but we're finding things out, from ultrasound surgery to cut out the addiction center of the brain, to influencing motivation/treating depression with magnetic/electrical fields with TMS and tdcs, we're ever so slightly making sharpened stones and crude axes of the stone age we're in

Years ago we were taught that the brain could not grow. You had what you were born with and after your twenties it degraded.

Now of course we are aware that the brain has plasticity. It can rewire itself, grow, learn.

There's a difference between slowing down and losing cognitive abilities. It's one thing to not be able to solve very complex problems anymore and another to not remember how to use a toothbrush. I don't think anyone's really disputing that we're on average more capable in 20s-40s.

In medical school we were taught that basically everyone gets alzheimers, or would get it if aged up to a certain age (200, 300, etc). You could make the same argument for cancer - actually in that vein prostate cancer is a big one people die with but not of. When you study the body enough you realize that every system at every micro/macro level is failing slowly with age, but we can only pick on one of them as the cause of death.

Re: citation needed : failed literature search link needed as pre-requisite

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