Hi there, you handsome devil! It’s mid-morning, and here you are in the kitchen, sporting what poets might call a “furrowed brow.” Now you’re staring at the sink, wondering: WHY? Are you hungry? Did you forget where you left your keys? Is it Mother’s Day again?
Eventually, you exit the kitchen, relieved nobody saw this little display of what neurologists describe as “going cuckoo crazy.” I’m kidding! You’re not crazy, you’re just a little whatchamacallit, slightly thingummy.
If you own a mirror or know a teenager, it will be clear to you that our bodies change dramatically and disappointingly as we age. Hair turns grey and migrates to all the wrong places.
Skin wrinkles and stretches and horrible spots appear, but never in the shape of Elvis or the Virgin Mary or something marketable. Keep in mind, all this fun goes on while we just hang around, waiting to die.
Whoa, Dave! That was bleak and mostly untrue. I blame a 10-minute walk on the beach at Qualicum, which resulted in three weeks of what sufferers in the previous century called “sciatica” or “lumbago” or just plain “ARGHHHHH!” A large part of the natural aging process involves joints and muscles and nerves seizing up. Worse, this is also true of our brains.
“Declarative memory” really craps out as you age. That’s the kind of memory that is consciously retrieved. There are two kinds: semantic memory (the facts that you learned, like how many planets are in the solar system, or the capital of Norway), and episodic memory (your personal experiences, like where you parked the car at the mall, or precisely why you are in the kitchen).
“Working memory” also goes the way of the dodo. That’s the ability to hold information in your mind, like a new friend’s phone number, or anything at all your boss just said about the big project due some time or other. It depends on the rapid processing of information rather than on stored knowledge, and it starts to decline about age 30.
“Procedural memory,” the type of long-term memory that is stored and retrieved without conscious effort, pretty much remains intact. This is why we remember how to ride a bike and how to tie our shoes long past when we can bend over.
Think of the neurons in your brain as people in a sports stadium doing the Mexican Wave in the 1980s, unless that is now considered a racist term, or a racist decade. Anyway, for the Wave to work, everybody in the stands has to be in sync, willing to jump up and spill beer at exactly the right time.
Over time, the human brain shrinks, and the stadium of the mind starts losing its Mexican Wavers. Neurons shrink, retract and deteriorate. The huge number of connections between neurons drops, and thinking slows down. You begin to care about neighbourhood cats and cultivate unhinged conservative views and drive extremely slowly.
Of late, several municipalities on 91原创 Island have been keen to get in on the act.
To be clear, I mean the part about driving extremely slowly.
For example, on May 1, drivers in Victoria’s Hillside-Quadra neighbourhood got to be first to experience the city’s new default speed limit of 30 km/h on residential streets, replacing the old limit of 50 km/h.
The new extremely slow speed applies to residential roads that do not have a centre line and are used by fewer than 1,000 vehicles per day.
Victoria will impose the 30 km/h limit on the Burnside-Gorge neighbourhood this fall, followed by Oaklands in the winter.
Saanich also recently lowered speed limits to 40 km/h along nine major routes, matching the preferred driving speed of the blue-rinse voters whose neurons are not firing as they once did, back when Wilhelm II was Kaiser.
In total, 660 kilometres of B.C. highways have had their speed limits lowered over the past couple of years.
Here on 91原创 Island, the stretch of the Trans-Canada from Cowichan Bay to Nanaimo dropped to 80 km/h from 90, part of Highway 19 from Parksville to Campbell River dropped to 110 from 120, and a section of Highway 19 from Sayward to Bloedel dropped to 90 from 100 km/h.
To my knowledge, no decision-makers cite reducing brain speeds as the reason for reducing speed limits. Instead, they quote many studies that clearly show that accidents are worse at higher speeds.
For example, a pedestrian hit by a vehicle travelling 50 km/h has an 80 per cent chance of dying from his injuries, while a pedestrian struck at 30 km/h has a 10 per cent chance.
This is all true. Driving slower is safer (as is thinking more before voting in municipal elections). But let me make the obvious point that driving at a speed of 0 km/h is safest of all.
Of course, that’s nuts. We’re not going to drive at 0 km/h. We’re not going to do all kinds of things in life that are clearly safer, such as giving up French fries or never, ever visiting the United States.
Life is full of dangers, even standing here at the sink, damned if I can remember why I am in the kitchen. I am all for mitigating the dangers, so long as doing so doesn’t put the brakes on truly living before my brain naturally slows down to those new extremely slow speed limits.
