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Amazon Review
Lawrence Whalley's The Ageing Brain is the seventh in Weidenfeld's excellent, if serendipitous, "Maps of the Mind" series, edited by Steven Rose. Whalley studies the molecular biology of the ageing brain and his book's core is an account of research into Alzheimer's disease. Whalley is upbeat: "There is a popular misconception that success in the fight against disease has simply replaced premature infant death or adult disease with untreatable disorders of late life", he observes. "The truth is quite different... A greater proportion of old people now enjoy better physical health than ever before." Hence his calling: "to help achieve for the brain what the final decades of the last century achieved for the body: fitter old brains for fitter old people". The outlook is good: new research shows that healthy brains develop as they age, optimising their structures to compensate for tissue loss. Yes, our brains do start shrinking--but this is not, after all, a sign of mental decline. Whalley's is not a winnable war. "To be old and sad seems a not unreasonable condition," he writes. What shows up in tests as impaired function is frequently only an old person's demoralisation in the face of loneliness and death. The simple fact of being old deals as cruel a blow to mental function as any biological change. The book concludes with a short description of computer-based palliatives to addled old age. Nostalgia machines, virtual reality: it's a horribly confused few pages--a little desperate, too, as Whalley rails against the dying of the light. --Simon Ings
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