YouSaid · the spoken record

Richard Restak

lines on the record: 34
first: 2024-01-31
most recent: 2024-01-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“have episodes of being able to not remember something. I give this example. Someone goes to a To a mall to get some bargain that they read about in the paper. They run in and make sure they still have it. And they do, and they're excited about that, and then they shop a little more and they come out, and they can't remember where they bought the car. Well, that's not something to worry about. When they went there, they weren't thinking about parking the car. They were thinking about, can I get this item that was advertised in the paper at such a bargain? They came out and said, oops, how did I get here? Did I drive or did somebody drop me off, take a bus? That'd be a little bit more worse because there'd be a lot more things that you would have had to forget. You would have had to forget being on the bus sitting, maybe talking to somebody, looking out the window. You forgot all that. The only thing you forgot was exactly where you put your car. That's a big difference.”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But we all have episodes of not being able to recall something. I mean, it doesn't mean that something terrible is coming up. I use this term over here. What was it called senior moments? I remember somebody just can't remember someone's name, but that gets back to the exercises that we talked about earlier. You can force yourself, as Samuel Johnson said, the art of a memory is the art of attention. So you pay attention to things and you'll more than likely remember them. But Todd, you know, there are occasions where you can't come up with a name, but I don't think you can continue to, first of all, you can't assume that you're coming down with a dementia because of it. And secondly, it's part along the normal continuum, which is one of the themes of my book. There's this continuum that goes through our life and where everybody is on this continuum somewhere. And you're going to have”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Others, let's get it back to something we talked about earlier, Alex. I mean, it may be a while before we have a cure, but bearing in mind that most cases come on in their 60s, 70s, 80s, if you find something that can delay the onset of the illness for, let's say, five years or certainly ten years, it would be like a cure. So it's pretty much like a cure, people would diagnose something unrelated. So maybe we're preventing focusing too much on the quote cure, but there's a lot of diseases we talked earlier. We don't have cure for. We just have treatments for them, medications that you can take, which you still have to keep taking the medicine. If you've got a bad blood pressure problem, I mean, you're going to have to keep taking antihypertensives for most of the rest of your life. You don't complain about that. And you say, well, that's just a fact. We'll come up with something that will help.”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go wow. I mean, now this is the kind of thing that is out of order. I mean, one particular incident, anybody can have that kind of thing happen. She didn't live in Washington. She lived out west. So it would be easy to get lost if you want more than one buck or block in a different direction.”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Spend their time all that. Here, and I don't know in England, but perhaps as well, there's too much of a custodial approach to the thing that, you know, if they even make one mistake, then suddenly they suffer for it. I had a patient who was moved here to be with her son because she was having some early Alzheimer's, and she was in a unit, what we call a care unit, but it was, you know, she was free to come and go as she wished, so she would go out shopping, things like that. One day she went out and she got lost. She couldn't quite figure out how to get back to the unit. So instead of asking somebody on the street, which would have been better, she called the unit and said, well, I can't get back. How do I get there? So they gave her the directions. So she got back and they moved her to a blocked unit. So she couldn't know a little girl.”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Views that are not normal and more characteristic of a dementia. If you look at the movies and television, for instance, they show the worst cases all the time. They don't ever show the mild cases. There are mild cases which sometimes the progression is slowed for whatever reason. I have to think it's slowed because of the interaction with other people. the person with some sense of autonomy and agency and things like that. There are what's called Alzheimer's villages, ones in England, and there's one in, I write about them in the book in Holland, where people live in communities with Alzheimer's. And the medical staff is there, but they're not intrusive. They sort of let people decide what they want to do.”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think when you think about some of the losses that people with Alzheimer's have, you can definitely combat that by themselves and the people around them. Loss of identity is a big thing. Begin to feel there's no linkage. Loss of autonomy, loss of the sense of urge of agency, in other words as being the person who does the various things. When you interact with someone who begins to have problems with their cognition, it's important that they be treated a certain way. In other words, don't argue with people if they have”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mokudos to you, Alex, because that's exactly right, and I feel that that is one of the things that keeps me cognitively intact. I mean, writing a book is not an easy thing. So you have to organize a lot of material. You see, it's the frontal lobes of the brain in which they have things like executive function, things having to do with Abstraction, concentration, things like that, that as one ages, they begin to atrophy a little bit, so they're not as easy to do. However, writing a book, as you just mentioned, is the Factored to that. I mean, you have to be organizing things, focusing, taking out extraneous things, all this. So yes, in answer to your very good question, I think it's very helpful.”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I always say to patients and people that do this say, well, try to figure out for yourself first. Well, I have no idea who it is. Well, then guess. And you'd be surprised how many times the guesses are correct because they lie outside of conscious awareness, which is another kind of memory, tacit. And of course, we have the procedural memory, which we learn to do things such that what we learn initially is effortful, but then as time goes on, there's no effort to it at all. Just do it unconsciously, so to speak.”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think it's a two edged sword. I think you can use the cell phones and things like that to enhance your cognitive functioning. I mean, at any time, if you're trying to think of a concept, you can check it out. You can look it up and see, oh yeah, who was in that movie? I think it was a certain actor, but you're not sure. So he just can bring this thing up and find out immediately. But the key, again, is to use the cell phone to use the electronics as the standard against your comparing your memory, not the other way around, where you say, well, I'm not sure who is. Let me just look it up.”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then as you can remember those things, you put the item that you want to remember on that in some ridiculous way, something that is amusing or bizarre or surreal. For instance, the ideas I just mentioned of going looking in a window at a library and seeing eggs there, well, it's kind of odd, or going to the front of Georgetown University and seeing it all catch flowing all over the streets, people walking through it. That type of thing is going to really get your memory going. And it's worth doing because I think this single most important part of fending off Alzheimer's and dementia is memory.”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that if you're trying to remember when you go to the store that you want cereal, well, then in my case, I would just picture my house as a big cereal box with cereal coming out of the top. If the next thing was eggs, I walked to the next spot in my mind, the library, I wouldn't see books in there. I would see eggs on the shelf, okay? So you just run all these down. If I want ketchup, when I get to the Georgetown University entrance, I'll see all the students coming out waiting in knee-deep ketchup. So that reminds me. So then when I get to the story, just go through all that and I'll get them all. And when you do it that way, it'll also do it backwards. But the key is to learn this particular event, this particular sequence. It doesn't take long. It's things you see every day”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you walk during the day at any particular path, try to find an area where you walk fairly regularly. Pick out 10 spots and memorize them so it can do a mental journey, walk on it. Like, for instance, my own case, I have my house, the local library, a coffee shop, liquor store, Georgetown University, medical school, Georgetown University itself, a restaurant called Cafe Milano. We have the Key Bridge, and then we have the Iwo Dribo Memorial, and then we have Reagan's Airport. So those 10, those things form the basis on which you put the memory objects that you want.”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“without looking at the cell phone only when you're at the very end of your shopping you want to look and see if you've forgotten anything so it's a matter of what's called working memory now the other thing about memory that I want to emphasize is that memory has to be a picture if you want to remember something it has to be something that rhymes with something else it's a picture whatever it may be because we brain, our normal brain doesn't function in terms of learning something if it's just language if it's just letters and words and sentences we had to learn to do that we were babies We were illiterate, but we could still see, we saw everything, we recognized there's a tree, there's my pet, all this. So what you want to do is transfer verbal language concepts into pictures. Now here's an easy way to do it.”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you put just the Tories or just that way, and then you do it with one's name, maybe one syllable, two syllable, three syllable. All these various things, and of course you can chuck yourself against the list. Now speaking of lists, we live in an age in which memory is imperiled by cell phones, for one thing. We tend to check everything through electronics. And the real key to maintaining your memory is to use the electronics, the cell phone, as the thing that you're going to test yourself against, so to speak. In other words, if you're making up a grocery list, it's fine to put it on your cell phone when you get to the store. It's there. That means you're not going to forget anything. But what you want to do is try to remember everything.”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, first of all, I've never met anyone who had a normal memory who had dementia. So we can start with that as a principle, that normal memory guarantees pretty much you don't have dementia. Parts of memory are very much associated with normal and even extraterrenal mental function. What is called working memory? Working memory is when you take a list like a list of prime ministers, for instance, and lists how far back can you go. And then you list them in your mind, you're not writing anything down. And then when you finally have them all down, write them so that you can check yourself and then review them in your mind alphabetically.”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About Egypt as the one teaching us all. So that was a magnificent obsession. And it doesn't have to be intellectual. It doesn't have to be study. It could be taking up carpentry if your life has been that of a lawyer or something, but maybe there's somebody in the family. When you were a kid was pretty good with her hands in terms of making furniture might be something you might want to investigate as long as you're careful and you'll get hurt with saws and things like that.”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Preserve, think of it as like finance, what reserve. And it has to be something that you are interested in. I give an example in the bulk of a man who I was on the trip to Egypt, and I was struck with the fact that there was one of the participants there, there was only 10 of us, who was very much taken up with Egyptology and knew a lot about it. He was a different person because as he called it himself, he was, he said, I'm strictly blue-collar, and he would make a joke out of it because everybody else was a doctor, a lawyer or whatever. And I said, so I was curious about him to start with. And I said, well, how did all this begin? And he said, well, I remember when I was in school taking Egypt study, the teacher talking about Egypt, I became very interested in it. And I retained that interest my whole life. I've taken courses. I've read books and all this. As a result, he knew much.”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, let's take someone who is... A wealthy man, wealthy person, has a lot of money. And his beach house is destroyed by a storm. Well, he just gets on a private plane and flies back to New York wherever he lives because he's got several houses and all that. So he has what we call financial reserve. Another person whose beach houses destroyed that may be their only house, or it's certainly a part of their economic well-being in their portfolio, so to speak. So they're devastated by it. So the same thing can be done about the intellect. The more that you've built up, the more knowledge that you have, the more cognitive insults you can take so that if you're starting on your way to Alzheimer's, it will take a lot longer before you get there because of this cognitive reserve. So the cognitive”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To a lesser extent, where people get together and they either go out to eat, Then have topics. Some of them could be set around a book, some of them could be set around a certain topic. And this gets people out of themselves, gets them energized, gets them busy, and that's the kind of thing that I suggest in the book.”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“real loners all their lives and it's hard for them to sort of go out and go to a party they never could so what i say to them is what is some of your interests here well i'm interested in pens or i'm interested in watches or whatever and i say is there any or are there any clubs in the city where you live that have this thing oh yeah there's a pen club in washington well why don't you look into it and join it so they join that and then it fulfills a lot of characteristics that will keep them sharp their curiosity they will be forced to interact with other people and they want to because they're talking about a common object of interest so this is the other thing i mentioned in the book about the magnificent obsession get really interested in something and then that will bring you into contact with other people socialization another one is eating clubs i think you have them in england we have here”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What do I do now? We're talking about education, self education, or communal education. And you can often combine these things. For instance, another area is keeping social obligation, I shouldn't say obligations, interactions, socialization intact. But you know, some people aren't very social. They're kind of...”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In their field when they were in their 80s. So it wasn't just that they contributed and accomplished things when they were 30s, 40s, and 50s, but they continued to be, one of them was a Nobel Prize winning author, the other was a humorist. And I asked them about what it is that they would say themselves keeps their mind sort of sharp. And they said, first of all, it was curiosity. You have to maintain a curiosity about other people and events. And secondly, you have to think about energy. Try to do things to increase your energy levels. And then keeping yourself busy so you're not sort of just filling time. Regular exercise, that's also important. But the education. Now the education is something saying, well, I can't go back to school or finish school.”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, first of all, they should get their hearing tested. That sounds like a very, but that's a, if you go around the world, not just to develop countries like England and the United States, but around the world, loss of hearing or decreased hearing is the premier cause of dementia because it isolates people from other people and they then become unable to communicate, so to speak, and unable to understand things. That's the first thing. So then after that, and of course keeping good health, keeping good diet, these are important things, exercising and all these things. But I concentrated my book on things that you don't think about as much and having been in other books. You know, with the word of the personality traits, for instance, that you have in people. So about 20 years ago, I selected some people who were contributing and continuing to be”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's no one understands why that helps, but it does. So if we think of dementias and Alzheimer's as something that's, you know, it's only a continuum from the way you and I are functioning right now, all the way up to the most severe case of dementia. There's a continuum there. There's a fear of it. You may be afraid of it. I may be afraid of it. We don't admit these continuum, but they're there. And if you look for them, you find them.”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's how he came up with this treatment for migraine. Now, what does this do? Why does it affect the migraine? We don't really know. We're not sure. It's empirical. Much of medicine is much more empirical, which means it's sort of serendipitous how we find out how things lithium, for instance, first treatment in bipolar disorder, was just discovered by accident, just noticed by certain people who go to take the waters, the cures of the spas in the 19th century tended to moderate their affect, their stream of thought, or pretty much the way they felt from day to day, good humor, bad humor. And it improved their humor. So that began the treatment of lithium using lithium for bipolar disorder.”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Generation that one or more people develop dementia at an early stage. Alzheimer's at an early stage. So this thing has to be kept in mind. We don't really understand a lot of diseases. Now, you also talked about treatment. You don't have to understand a disease to treat it Let me give you an example, a doctor that I know well, one of my teachers, was seeing people for migraine headaches. And one day a patient came in and said, you know, since I've been put on this particular medicine for my blood pressure, my migraines are better. And then soon another patient came in and said the same thing. And he said, well, what medicine is this you're using? And it was propranolis, a beta blocker. So he then thought, well, it would be interesting to see how that affects a migrant or who doesn't have high blood pressure.”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we don't want to exaggerate the knowledge that we have about other diseases. Nobody has an exact explanation for why people develop hypertension or diabetes or anything. We can go down and look at the pancreas and the putting out of insulin, and it's not as efficient and so forth. What causes that? Everything essentially, I think, is moving towards genetic explanations. I think the dementias are going to be distributed according to our understanding of the genetics. It's already started. For instance, the people who develop Alzheimer's are usually older people. Certainly over 50. But there are cases of people in their 20s and 30s that have developed it. Now, that's a very unusual onset of dimension that's almost always inherited. If you see that in a family, you'll see it in each.”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Downstairs, or that carrying packages causes falling downstairs or taking medications. But all of these are correlations. They're not causes. So this is the same thing that holds when we try to say what causes Alzheimer's. We really don't know. I mean, we know it's correlated with plaques and tangles and different microscopic changes in the brain, but we don't know whether they're the cause of the disease or whether they're just something that comes about as a result of the real cause, which could be something like inflammation.”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I use the example of falling downstairs. Someone loses their balance and falls down the stairs and they fracture one bone in their back. Not so seriously that they're going to be paralyzed or anything, but they have a fracture. So you can say that the fall down the stairs caused the fracture. But when you go into the causes of why they fell in the first place, there's no one reason. There's a correlation of various contributors to the fall. Maybe they were not quite awake. Maybe they were trying to do too many things at once, carrying several packages. Maybe they were on the effect of medications that they were taken. There's even the possibility they might have had a drink or two and all these things will add to it. So you can't say that drinking is falling.”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“does not mean necessarily that anybody has a suboptimal brain so you just have to look for the specific giveaways that may indicate that someone's had gone beyond the acceptable normal.”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I started off as a psychiatrist, and we use the term thinking disorder frequently, usually in reference to schizophrenia. The term thinking disorder is not used as much by neurologists. I now practice principally neurology or a certain area of it called neuropsychiatry. And these people have disorders which have to do primarily with thinking. We talked a moment ago about memory, about cognition in areas like thinking, abstraction, things like that that can be affected by the disease, any of these diseases. Now, the key to remember is that we all have these problems. Everybody has its occasions. They can't come up with a name, they can't come up with a concept, they get lost when they go into unfamiliar places. There's nothing wrong with that.”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I think that's correct. We have different types of dimension, different causes. Some of them are due to trauma, as you pointed out, traumatic brain injury. That's not a degenerative disease. Most of the dementias that we usually talk about are generative brain diseases, Alzheimer's, frontal temporal dementia, Lewy body, et cetera. And these are parts that the final clinical result may be very similar. For instance, we often talk about Alzheimer's as being characterized by loss of memory and decreasing memory power. That's true in most cases that's true, but it doesn't have to be. People with Alzheimer's could present with psychiatric features, as do the original patient that was described by Elohimer in the 19th century. This was one who had jealousy about her husband and was agitated and things like that. It wasn't until later that the memory”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dementia is an overall umbrella term to cover all different types of dementia. Alzheimer's is one of them and the most common, but there are four or five others that are characteristic of degenerative brain disease. So when you talk about dementia, you have to be more specific if you want to say which particular disease is it? Is it Alzheimer's? Is it frontal temporal dementia? Which is it?”
2024-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · How to Prevent Dementia, with Richard Restak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT