Alzheimer Buster

Here’s my personal preventive program to avoid acquiring Alzheimer's.

Sometime in my middle-later stages of life, say, around fifty-five or sixty, I’ll start the program. I’ll begin slow but I don’t think it will require that great an effort in terms of time devotion. Like physical health, you don’t need to build up to a five-hour daily workout. No, twenty-minutes a day getting the heart beatin’ is good enough for the body.

For the mind, I’m guessing a half-hour to forty-five minutes a day. I’d do it while the wife watches her evening shows.

I’d study trigonometric identities.

What?

Way back as a junior in high school I first became enamored with trig identities. Now, I hated the practical applications of right triangles, sines, cosines, tangents, etc. Have no surveyor blood in my veins or ancestral lineage, I guess. But I was fascinated with the functions as mathematical concepts. As Platonic forms of pure ideas. Identities are basically how sines, cosines, tangents, and their reciprocals relate to each other. To my surprise, they related in ways as if they behaved like numbers.

Much like Euclid erecting his Geometry, the Jesuit teaching our class led us to proving some fundamental identities, and then we used a half-dozen or so to extrapolate and prove scores of others.

But what I recall enjoying best was the puzzle-solving factor. He’d give us a big massive conglomeration of trig functions divided multiplied raised to such and such powers etc etc, and expect us to factor it down to its simplest terms. I would get lost in solving the problems. It was like Word Search puzzles for math nerds. I remember doing well on these questions of our mid-terms and finals.

So I would refresh my memory re-learning all the identities, how to derive them and how to deconstruct the monstrosities. And that will keep the neurons and axions firing in the noggin, and will hopefully stay the onset of any memory loss. I’m being serious here. Research indicates that older folks who use their brains regularly (like playing chess or doing crossword puzzles) are better equipped to hold such mental declines at bay.

Immediately after mastering all things trigonometrically identic, I’d start working on integrating trigonometric functions of all colors and stripes.

I won’t be suffering from Alzheimer's, if all goes according to plan. Though I’ll probably drive the wife crazy calling her theta all the time.