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Comment by throwaway7767 | Hacker News Reader

A few years back, I was taken to the hospital with meningitis. I've never been so sick in my life.

The scariest part was that I lost use of a lot of my short term memory, and I had problems concentrating. I couldn't even really participate in conversations because I'd spend minutes trying to comprehend a sentence, and by the time I decoded it the conversation had moved on.

Luckily, my mental abilities returned after a couple of weeks. But ever since, I've been mortally terrified of alzheimers and the like. We don't realise how much of our identity is wrapped up in our intellect until it's removed.

Since then I've seen grandparents slowly succumbing to alzheimers and dementia. It's heartbreaking. This place sounds great, I wish my country had a similar thing for my grandmother.

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I had meningitis when I was child.

Mumps triggered it with some pancreatitis on the side. Double the 'itis', double the fun they say.

Spending weeks in quarantine, I only saw my parent through a glass window. Luckily my memories of the whole experience is a blur now. Maybe it's better not to remember the ordeal.

The only scar that's stayed is stuttering, which is sometimes better, sometimes worse.

I'm afraid what else might have gotten damaged back then, that might come out when I'm old.

> We don't realise how much of our identity is wrapped up in our intellect until it's removed.

What part of your identity is not wrapped up in your brain? I define myself by what my brain does. Alzheimers or a similar degenerative disease would have me seek out assisted suicide.

A significant part of my identity is in my body. I am an athlete: I am a skier, a runner, a biker, a swimmer, a disc golfer. I am someone who works with his hands: I am a programmer, a carpenter, an electrician, a painter, a mechanic.

But I expect many of these physical abilities to degrade as I age. It is sometimes emotional to realize I will never again best some of the personal records I set in college athletics, but I can still enjoy the activities and work towards self-improvement in other areas.

But yes, there is little I fear more than a degenerative mental disease. Both my maternal grandmother and paternal grandfather have Parkinson's, and there is a significant genetic component. It's very hard to steel myself against the potential dementia.

What good are your excellently developed periphery devices if the mind can't properly control them? They are as good as gone, except for maybe a little muscle memory for simple motions. But what good is the retained ability to perfectly hit the keys if the ability to remember a melody or formulate source code would be lost?

But being a programmer is likely a sort of defense against Alzheimer's: straining your brain, by writing code or playing scrabble or solving puzzles, is said to resist the onset of it somehow.

This is actually completely false. There's no evidence that brain games or intellectually rigorous activities provide any benefit in preventing any neuro-degenerative disorders.

The only benefit has been that people who do these things tend to have it detected early, when some treatments can help delay, but not prevent the onset.

> What good are your excellently developed periphery devices if the mind can't properly control them?

What good is a mind if you don't have peripheral devices to produce output from it?

Also yes. One should better keep both sides in order.

> But ever since, I've been mortally terrified of alzheimers and the like.

It is terrifying, the worst part is that neurological diseases are misdiagnosed every so often. Many patients will first see their whole life ruined before they can even put a finger on what is wrong.

Dementia is the single thing I fear the most. Without my intelligence, I have literally no marketable skills (my body became unfit for heavy manual labor years ago).

I also watched my grandmother go through dementia in the last months before she passed away. It was hell.

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