Thoraiya DyerDoes Sudoku Stop Dementia? (And can budgies stop telemarketers?)
April 16th 2008 04:58
I didn’t mind when I saw them on the train and at the bus stop. It was fine having them hover around in the crossword section of the paper. But now, they’re in MY bathroom, and I need to find out if they actually work, or if it’s an alien conspiracy to divert human kind from productive labour.
No, I’m not talking about swarms of Daddy Long Legs's (although the Queensland Museum, http://www.qm.qld.gov.au, advises us that the Daddy Long Legs is the natural predator of the Redback Spider, so I’m quite happy to see the little critters living around my bathtub).
I’m talking about Sudoku, that Evil Square of Doom numbers puzzle where you have to fill in the empty squares with the digits 1-9 without replicating any numbers, either in the rows, or the columns, or the itty bitty boxes.
Forgive me for suspecting that all that expended brain power could be better used to design a more efficient solar cell - or train budgies to answer the phone calls of telemarketers.
I suppose it’s worth doing a bit of digging to see if the claims of sudoku fanatics are valid.
According to www.dementiacareaustralia.com, Dementia “is not a disease, but rather an umbrella term for a variety of symptoms that may accompany or indicate certain diseases or conditions. Today over 60 different conditions are known to cause dementia symptoms.”
In between an avalanche of helpful advice for addressing the feelings and needs of dementia sufferers, it describes the four stages of dementia:
“In the first stage, people with dementia begin to experience that something is not right – ‘The old memory is playing up.’ They may feel embarrassed or frightened when they recognize changes in their memory or thinking.”
“In the second stage, people with dementia are far more relaxed and inclined to give in and let go. They may start to withdraw and appear to become preoccupied with the past, thinking back to happy times, restoring old memories and sometimes living in that time and reality. Their way of communicating may change too. Sentence construction may not be as clear. They might start a sentence, and it make perfect sense; but then it becomes muddled in the middle and ends as ‘gobbledegook’, which is hard to understand.”
“In the third stage, people with dementia start to withdraw even further into the past and become so preoccupied with their memories that they ‘live’ almost entirely in that time and reality.
They may also start to wander. When this happens, it is important to know that there is usually a valid reason. Either the person is looking for something or someone, or is trying to prevent boredom.”
“In the fourth stage, people with dementia may completely shut out the outside world. They might sit in a chair or lie in bed staring straight into thin air, or they might have their eyes closed. They may not respond when someone walks into the room or speaks to them.
Today, we know that the person at this stage still hears and experiences through touch, and it is extremely important that we continue to talk with them and still make physical contact.”
Phew, that all sounds rather scary. Why wouldn’t you do sudoku if you could use it to delay or avoid dementia? But where is the clear link between the two?
In an article by Drs Shiel and Schoenfield on Medicinenet.com, there are some interesting statistics on dementia:
“Dementia is significant loss of intellectual abilities such as memory capacity, severe enough to interfere with social or occupational functioning. Dementia is reported in as many as 1% of adults 60 years of age. Moreover, it has been estimated that the frequency of dementia doubles every five years after 60 years of age. So, dementia is clearly related to aging.
Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia. Among other causes are medical conditions (thyroid disease, drug toxicity, thiamine deficiency with alcoholism, and others), brain injury, strokes, multiple sclerosis, infection of the brain (such as meningitis and syphilis), HIV infection, hydrocephalus, Pick's disease, and brain tumors.”
Clearly there are lots of things that can go wrong with the brain once we start getting towards our used-by date.
The authors go on to cite that, “Dr. Joe Verghese and others at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in collaboration with Syracuse University studied 469 subjects older than 75 years of age who lived in the community setting. They recorded the frequency of participation in leisure activities for the subjects. They documented their thinking and physical abilities and recorded them in activity-days per week.
The results of the study were recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine (N Engl J Med 2003;348:2508-16). The researchers found that over an average period of 5.4 years, dementia developed in 124 subjects (Alzheimer's disease in 61 subjects, vascular dementia in 30, mixed dementia in 25, and other types of dementia in 8). They also found that among leisure activities, reading, playing board games, playing musical instruments, and dancing were associated with a reduced risk of dementia.”
So. Reading, board games, musical instruments and dancing are mentioned. Not sudoku. Yet, I found this particular NEJM study cited on at least ten different sudoku-advocating sites. A search of the NEJM archives returns a polite, “Search was unable to find any results for sudoku. Here are some suggestions: Check your spelling.”
Ian Robertson, from Trinity College in London, is also frequently quoted as championing sudoku as a dementia preventative. I’m not about to go and buy his book, “Stay Sharp,” but I am going to quote him in an interview with The Times Really Long Link in which he advocates aerobic exercise, a good diet and stress reduction as a way of keeping the brain healthier for longer:
““Over-60s who took part in a four-month programme of aerobic exercise — enough to make them breathe harder, and their heart to beat faster — showed improvements in mental abilities. The benefits were esp- ecially marked in the frontal lobes of the brain, which are involved in the ability to organise, make decisions, show initiative, have a sense of humour, pay attention and remember things.
Exercise works by generating a chemical that encourages the growth of new brain cells and new brain connections; by increasing serotonin levels, which control mood; and by causing new blood vessels to grow to nourish the brain.
“For the over-50s, exercise is a sort of wonder-drug that makes you more mentally agile, less forgetful and delays the loss of sharpness,” Professor Robertson said.”
OK, OK, so he also talks about brain exercises.
He eventually says that “brain exercises were a useful way of maintaining memory, the first part of the brain to show its decline… One of the reasons our memories let us down as we get older is that we don’t attack the information with the same brain vigour as when we were young… This has been observed in brain-scanning experiments. When a group of young people were given a list of words to memorise, their brains showed a healthy surge of activity in the left side of the frontal lobe, as well as in the main memory centre in the hippocampus. But , when 70-year-olds were given the same task, they did not switch on the left frontal lobe nearly as much, and this is probably why they did not remember as well… Professor Robertson cited a study of 3,000 people aged between 65 and 94, who used memory strategies, were trained in problem-solving, or who speeded up their reactions with a computer game…When compared with a control group who did none of these things, the groups who were trained had an increase in brain function roughly equal to the decline expected in 7 to 14 years of ageing.”
Still no specific mention of sudoku, but we are getting much closer. I’m not sure what study Robertson is talking about, and, again, I’m not going to buy his book to find out, but it would be interesting to know which memory strategies, problem-solving tasks and computer games were used, and whether the results were determined by more brain scanning, or just by the number of kills Granny got in Quake III. Because that is NOT an important life skill (sorry, Ryan).
Giles Hardingham, of the University of Edinburgh, is another frequently quoted source.
Nintendo pounced on the announcement at the 2005 annual meeting for the Society for Neuroscience in Washington DC that sudoku can trigger “survival genes” in the brain.
Yet, the direct quote from Giles is “when brain cells are highly stimulated, many unused genes are suddenly reactivated. We have found that a group of these genes can make the active brain cells far healthier than lazy, inactive cells, and more likely to live a long life. These findings also have implications at the other end of life, where maternal drug taking and drinking can cause these survival genes to be turned off in the brain of unborn babies.”
How does that justify the claims of Nintendo’s 2006 Dr Sudoku game for gameboy Really Long Link that sudoku could save your life??
Washing your hands after chopping up raw chicken can save your life, but I don’t see Nintendo bringing out a game called Wash Your hands After Chopping Up Raw Chicken!
As reported by Science Daily in December of 05 Really Long Link Hardingham goes on to say:
“We recently discovered that a critical step in turning on these survival genes involves activating a master genetic controller called CREB. We aim to home in on which of these CREB-controlled genes are crucial in helping the brain cells live longer and become resistant to trauma. By being able to explain at molecular level the basis of brain activity-dependent survival, it will open the way to developing better therapies to help halt the progress of neurological diseases.”
Why wont any of these pesky researchers say the word sudoku? Sudoku! SAY IT, GILES! SUDOKU MAKES YOU IMMORTAL!
Well, maybe he didn’t say it because it doesn’t. You can do sudoku, or you can do ballroom dancing, but whatever you do, if you want to reduce your chances of getting dementia, don’t sit on your butt watching TV and eating nachos.
A final note on budgies.
(Not in relation to telemarketers, either. Yes, I know we’re all seeking the answer to the unwanted phone calls menace, but I’ll answer my own topic query right now: No. Budgies cannot stop telemarketers. Only dishing out for a silent number can come close to giving you peace and privacy.)
Ahem.
Please never give a budgie one of these:
Sandpaper perches will be enthusiastically sold to you at pet shops and bargain warehouses, but I doubt you will ever see one at your local veterinary clinic. Why? Because abrasive perches not only fail to keep bird toenails short, but they wear down the skin on the bottom of the bird’s foot, allowing infections to get in and take hold.
This is known as bumblefoot, Really Long Link and it can be fatal. Birds have no way of resting their feet; they don’t have the option of whacking them up on the couch for a few days. Dowel rods as perches can also cause bumblefoot. They are hard and are the same diameter all the way along, so the bird has no choice about the degree of flexion in its itty bitty toes. In the wild, the variation in perch diameter gives them good exercise - and they don't have to stand in their own accumulated poop, either.
When you buy a new bird cage – or if you’re looking at your current bird cage and seeing dowels and/or sandpaper – please, chuck out the perches and go break some twigs off the closest gum tree (the more bark, the better!) instead.
Cheers, on behalf of your budgie… if it COULD answer the phone for you, it definitely would.
No, I’m not talking about swarms of Daddy Long Legs's (although the Queensland Museum, http://www.qm.qld.gov.au, advises us that the Daddy Long Legs is the natural predator of the Redback Spider, so I’m quite happy to see the little critters living around my bathtub).
I’m talking about Sudoku, that Evil Square of Doom numbers puzzle where you have to fill in the empty squares with the digits 1-9 without replicating any numbers, either in the rows, or the columns, or the itty bitty boxes.
Forgive me for suspecting that all that expended brain power could be better used to design a more efficient solar cell - or train budgies to answer the phone calls of telemarketers.
I suppose it’s worth doing a bit of digging to see if the claims of sudoku fanatics are valid.
According to www.dementiacareaustralia.com, Dementia “is not a disease, but rather an umbrella term for a variety of symptoms that may accompany or indicate certain diseases or conditions. Today over 60 different conditions are known to cause dementia symptoms.”
In between an avalanche of helpful advice for addressing the feelings and needs of dementia sufferers, it describes the four stages of dementia:
“In the first stage, people with dementia begin to experience that something is not right – ‘The old memory is playing up.’ They may feel embarrassed or frightened when they recognize changes in their memory or thinking.”
“In the second stage, people with dementia are far more relaxed and inclined to give in and let go. They may start to withdraw and appear to become preoccupied with the past, thinking back to happy times, restoring old memories and sometimes living in that time and reality. Their way of communicating may change too. Sentence construction may not be as clear. They might start a sentence, and it make perfect sense; but then it becomes muddled in the middle and ends as ‘gobbledegook’, which is hard to understand.”
“In the third stage, people with dementia start to withdraw even further into the past and become so preoccupied with their memories that they ‘live’ almost entirely in that time and reality.
They may also start to wander. When this happens, it is important to know that there is usually a valid reason. Either the person is looking for something or someone, or is trying to prevent boredom.”
“In the fourth stage, people with dementia may completely shut out the outside world. They might sit in a chair or lie in bed staring straight into thin air, or they might have their eyes closed. They may not respond when someone walks into the room or speaks to them.
Today, we know that the person at this stage still hears and experiences through touch, and it is extremely important that we continue to talk with them and still make physical contact.”
Phew, that all sounds rather scary. Why wouldn’t you do sudoku if you could use it to delay or avoid dementia? But where is the clear link between the two?
In an article by Drs Shiel and Schoenfield on Medicinenet.com, there are some interesting statistics on dementia:
“Dementia is significant loss of intellectual abilities such as memory capacity, severe enough to interfere with social or occupational functioning. Dementia is reported in as many as 1% of adults 60 years of age. Moreover, it has been estimated that the frequency of dementia doubles every five years after 60 years of age. So, dementia is clearly related to aging.
Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia. Among other causes are medical conditions (thyroid disease, drug toxicity, thiamine deficiency with alcoholism, and others), brain injury, strokes, multiple sclerosis, infection of the brain (such as meningitis and syphilis), HIV infection, hydrocephalus, Pick's disease, and brain tumors.”
Clearly there are lots of things that can go wrong with the brain once we start getting towards our used-by date.
The authors go on to cite that, “Dr. Joe Verghese and others at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in collaboration with Syracuse University studied 469 subjects older than 75 years of age who lived in the community setting. They recorded the frequency of participation in leisure activities for the subjects. They documented their thinking and physical abilities and recorded them in activity-days per week.
The results of the study were recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine (N Engl J Med 2003;348:2508-16). The researchers found that over an average period of 5.4 years, dementia developed in 124 subjects (Alzheimer's disease in 61 subjects, vascular dementia in 30, mixed dementia in 25, and other types of dementia in 8). They also found that among leisure activities, reading, playing board games, playing musical instruments, and dancing were associated with a reduced risk of dementia.”
So. Reading, board games, musical instruments and dancing are mentioned. Not sudoku. Yet, I found this particular NEJM study cited on at least ten different sudoku-advocating sites. A search of the NEJM archives returns a polite, “Search was unable to find any results for sudoku. Here are some suggestions: Check your spelling.”
Ian Robertson, from Trinity College in London, is also frequently quoted as championing sudoku as a dementia preventative. I’m not about to go and buy his book, “Stay Sharp,” but I am going to quote him in an interview with The Times Really Long Link in which he advocates aerobic exercise, a good diet and stress reduction as a way of keeping the brain healthier for longer:
““Over-60s who took part in a four-month programme of aerobic exercise — enough to make them breathe harder, and their heart to beat faster — showed improvements in mental abilities. The benefits were esp- ecially marked in the frontal lobes of the brain, which are involved in the ability to organise, make decisions, show initiative, have a sense of humour, pay attention and remember things.
Exercise works by generating a chemical that encourages the growth of new brain cells and new brain connections; by increasing serotonin levels, which control mood; and by causing new blood vessels to grow to nourish the brain.
“For the over-50s, exercise is a sort of wonder-drug that makes you more mentally agile, less forgetful and delays the loss of sharpness,” Professor Robertson said.”
OK, OK, so he also talks about brain exercises.
He eventually says that “brain exercises were a useful way of maintaining memory, the first part of the brain to show its decline… One of the reasons our memories let us down as we get older is that we don’t attack the information with the same brain vigour as when we were young… This has been observed in brain-scanning experiments. When a group of young people were given a list of words to memorise, their brains showed a healthy surge of activity in the left side of the frontal lobe, as well as in the main memory centre in the hippocampus. But , when 70-year-olds were given the same task, they did not switch on the left frontal lobe nearly as much, and this is probably why they did not remember as well… Professor Robertson cited a study of 3,000 people aged between 65 and 94, who used memory strategies, were trained in problem-solving, or who speeded up their reactions with a computer game…When compared with a control group who did none of these things, the groups who were trained had an increase in brain function roughly equal to the decline expected in 7 to 14 years of ageing.”
Still no specific mention of sudoku, but we are getting much closer. I’m not sure what study Robertson is talking about, and, again, I’m not going to buy his book to find out, but it would be interesting to know which memory strategies, problem-solving tasks and computer games were used, and whether the results were determined by more brain scanning, or just by the number of kills Granny got in Quake III. Because that is NOT an important life skill (sorry, Ryan).
Giles Hardingham, of the University of Edinburgh, is another frequently quoted source.
Nintendo pounced on the announcement at the 2005 annual meeting for the Society for Neuroscience in Washington DC that sudoku can trigger “survival genes” in the brain.
Yet, the direct quote from Giles is “when brain cells are highly stimulated, many unused genes are suddenly reactivated. We have found that a group of these genes can make the active brain cells far healthier than lazy, inactive cells, and more likely to live a long life. These findings also have implications at the other end of life, where maternal drug taking and drinking can cause these survival genes to be turned off in the brain of unborn babies.”
How does that justify the claims of Nintendo’s 2006 Dr Sudoku game for gameboy Really Long Link that sudoku could save your life??
Washing your hands after chopping up raw chicken can save your life, but I don’t see Nintendo bringing out a game called Wash Your hands After Chopping Up Raw Chicken!
As reported by Science Daily in December of 05 Really Long Link Hardingham goes on to say:
“We recently discovered that a critical step in turning on these survival genes involves activating a master genetic controller called CREB. We aim to home in on which of these CREB-controlled genes are crucial in helping the brain cells live longer and become resistant to trauma. By being able to explain at molecular level the basis of brain activity-dependent survival, it will open the way to developing better therapies to help halt the progress of neurological diseases.”
Why wont any of these pesky researchers say the word sudoku? Sudoku! SAY IT, GILES! SUDOKU MAKES YOU IMMORTAL!
Well, maybe he didn’t say it because it doesn’t. You can do sudoku, or you can do ballroom dancing, but whatever you do, if you want to reduce your chances of getting dementia, don’t sit on your butt watching TV and eating nachos.
A final note on budgies.
(Not in relation to telemarketers, either. Yes, I know we’re all seeking the answer to the unwanted phone calls menace, but I’ll answer my own topic query right now: No. Budgies cannot stop telemarketers. Only dishing out for a silent number can come close to giving you peace and privacy.)
Ahem.
Please never give a budgie one of these:
Sandpaper perches will be enthusiastically sold to you at pet shops and bargain warehouses, but I doubt you will ever see one at your local veterinary clinic. Why? Because abrasive perches not only fail to keep bird toenails short, but they wear down the skin on the bottom of the bird’s foot, allowing infections to get in and take hold.
This is known as bumblefoot, Really Long Link and it can be fatal. Birds have no way of resting their feet; they don’t have the option of whacking them up on the couch for a few days. Dowel rods as perches can also cause bumblefoot. They are hard and are the same diameter all the way along, so the bird has no choice about the degree of flexion in its itty bitty toes. In the wild, the variation in perch diameter gives them good exercise - and they don't have to stand in their own accumulated poop, either.
When you buy a new bird cage – or if you’re looking at your current bird cage and seeing dowels and/or sandpaper – please, chuck out the perches and go break some twigs off the closest gum tree (the more bark, the better!) instead.
Cheers, on behalf of your budgie… if it COULD answer the phone for you, it definitely would.
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Comment by Ganesh
Comment by Thoraiya Dyer
Demented World
Comment by DrNat
I found your fascinating website whilst researching budgies and was surprised to find dementia in the same article because in one of those weird co-incidences I breed exhibition budgies and started working with dementia patients a few months ago. Stranger still, a lady I recently sat next to on a plane introduced me to sudoku to help solve the puzzle.
I think you are the person I am meant to express my suspicions why more and younger people getting dementia particularly women as young as 40.
(That's me in ten years!!! Sobering thought...)
Has anyone investigated a link between dementia and the ingestion of artificial sweetners sodium saccharin, aspartame and plastic in our food chain? Artificial sweeteners are in toothpaste which is also ingested. (I don't think I should recommend any toothpastes to anyone no matter how many free samples they give to me with all these chemicals in them. So much so, I have started making my own.)
Your thoughts?
Cheers,
Natalya.
Comment by Thoraiya Dyer
Demented World
I remember as a teenager hiding my Mum's cans of Diet Coke because someone had told me about the connection... ever since, I've been curious to know whether I was reacting to media hype or if the connection is real.
Just give me time
Comment by DrNat
I believe she got mental illness from artificial sweeteners and diabetes from trans-fats foods and from a recommended diet where half of it was comprised of wheat, corn and dairy. How is that a balanced diet Australian nutritionists? I feed extra grains to my budgies when I want to fatten them up a bit for showing, and farmers do the same with cattle. Maybe if at least 50% of her nutrition was from fruit and vegetables (what we have been living on for centuries) she wouldn't have diabetes. But I can't prove it. Maybe you can? A life-times work I imagine.
Comment by MSchwartz