A reading day today, combined with our mandatory 5+kms walk through now familiar areas combined with some new discoveries. Being in the centre of the old part can get a bit busy at times and exploring the quieter less familiar areas like today provides time for reflection. While the older parts are what many seem to yearn for, it is the thinking around how to make them more productive that keeps them alive.

I’m reflecting on this as I read the book I recently bought in Cadiz. The old part of my brain, I had simply expected, would always be there doing a reasonable job. But since I have had PD, I realise that the loss of dopamine would inhibit its ability to do this. This is one of the reasons I write this blog and pen poetry, in my attempt to make changes to my brain, possible due to the brain’s neuroplasticity.

The lack of dopamine, from what I have read, takes away or lessens the desire to do things. So our medications restore that to some extent but not in the long term. As a Californian neurobiologist Michael Merzenich puts it in this book I am reading – The Secret Life of the Mind – when we receive a reward the brain is more predisposed to change. If our desire lessens due to lack of dopamine then it is inevitable we won’t receive those rewards, therefore lessening the brain’s disposition to change.

So the old parts may look okay on the outside, but inside, without the renovations and other methods to keep them alive, there is a high possibility that they will deteriorate. So a lot of this in the view that I have formed, from my reading, is to do with me and my choices about how I do this.

Mariano Sigman, in his book is saying that we need to recover that enthusiasm, that patience, that motivation and that conviction so we can find, or continue to follow, our passion every day as an exercise to help at least, to give this change a chance.