"I Had My Old Girl Back"

[00:00:02] Speaker A: So, simply put, I don't talk about paradoxical acidity anymore. I just think about dementia as a disorder of the mind. And the goal of my clinical workup is across the stages, from the earliest of clinical signs and symptoms to the terminal stage, is to get a sense of how the patient perceives their mind and how the caregiver perceives the mind of the patient. [00:00:40] Speaker B: Welcome to the Age of Aging, a. [00:00:42] Speaker C: Podcast about living well with an aging. [00:00:44] Speaker B: Brain produced by the Penn Memory Center. I'm Jake Johnson. [00:00:48] Speaker D: And I'm Terence Casey. [00:00:50] Speaker B: Hey, Terence. [00:00:52] Speaker D: Welcome back. [00:00:53] Speaker B: Welcome back to episode one, season three of the Age of Aging. How was your winter? [00:01:00] Speaker D: Yeah, a little. Little gloomy, a little Christmassy. We had all ends of the spectrum in there. We talked about at the end of our special episode that the sounds of spring training and baseball is. Is the. A sign of new life for me. How about you? [00:01:16] Speaker B: It was pretty good. I saw some family over the holidays. You know, got through January and February. [00:01:22] Speaker D: Well, since you've made it through February, we can look ahead at the year. We know that we're not just kicking off this episode, but we're actually getting into a whole new season of the Age of Aging. And I think when we. When we started our first season of just four episodes, we didn't know what a season really meant or what. What's different? What can people expect going into season three. [00:01:45] Speaker B: Yeah, well, at the beginning of January, we released that bonus episode with Dr. Eddie Le, Jason Carloish and Dave Wolk. We then had another bonus episode that we released recently with Anne Basting to kind of set up this next season because we wanted to introduce some new ideas. And one of them was the beautiful questions, which we introduced a little bit in season two when we talked about ambasting in the Arts in the Mind episode. But we wanted to make it another aspect of the podcast because we've always just been looking for ways to include the audience a little bit more, try and get people involved, hear other voices than Terrence and I. So we. We brought on ANN1 just because we really like Ann and. And we think that she's doing really cool, interesting things in creative care. But also we wanted to use the beautiful questions as a way of engaging the audience and just hearing about people's perspective on the world and sharing a little bit of their life. So that's one big change that will come this season, and I think that's going to be a really fun addition to the show. Some episode topics I'm really looking forward to. We have an episode that's going to be all about younger caregivers and exploring early onset dementia, which is not very well known. I didn't know about it before we had started working on the episode. We have another episode that's going to be about preparing for end of life. And then another episode is an episode about how doing things with your hands is beneficial for your brain. So we talk a lot about exercise at the Penn Memory center being one of the greatest things you can do for your. Your brain and for getting older. But this is really looking specifically at how just using your hands to craft things, to make things, can really help you de stress and stave off things like depression and anxiety as you get older and help your longevity. [00:03:47] Speaker D: And at the end of the day, we're still bringing in the expert voices from Penn and beyond. We're looking to hear the voices of our patients and research participants and caregivers, but also some of the voices people may not expect, like the artists in residence at different research groups, and a death doula, which is a thing that I had never heard of before about a year and a half ago here. So a nice diverse chorus of voices I expected on season three of the Age of Aging. And so to kick off the season, we thought we would talk about a phenomenon that was, I think, is described in this episode both as, quote, relatively rare and, quote, pretty common. Something that used to be known as paradoxical lucidity. And this is something that we've heard about frequently in the Penn Memory center clinic, but also is something my own family had gone through. My grandmother, when I was young, she suffered a stroke and developed dementia. At the time, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. And now, looking back on it, I realized that there was a thing called vascular dementia that we didn't talk about. But one thing that you still see often is when people talk about Alzheimer's disease, they refer to it as a progressive disease with a steady decline over time. And what we'll talk about today is that that just isn't the case, that you will have these moments of clarity, of lucidity that could be a few words or a sentence, or it could be an action. We saw that with my grandmother, who confused her middle school grandchild with her brother. And whether she was also a young child in her mind or not, I don't know. But every now and then would have these moments of clarity that were pretty bittersweet for my mother, my uncle, her brother, because you felt for a moment that you had your loved one back. But just as quickly it felt you were losing them again. [00:05:48] Speaker B: I think that there's two parts to this. There's the research side of this, but also there's the more emotional relationship side, too. Lucidity so to start off the episode, we wanted to feature an essay from Anne Basting about lucidity that talks about a moment over the holidays with her mother and her family in which her mother experienced a lucid episode. And then we'll transition into a section of the episode with Dr. Jason Carloish and Dr. Justin Clapp and a study that they conducted about paradoxical lucidity. [00:06:26] Speaker D: Okay, looking forward to it. [00:06:35] Speaker E: We are gathered in my sister's elegant dining room for a holiday meal. Creating holiday rituals is one of my sister's many superpowers. There are candles, glowing pine boughs and bright birds rest on the mantel. The table is layered with woven runners, placemats, and glassware that remind us of generations gone by. She has trained us well, and my brother has sent another in a series of tenderly crafted centerpieces, this one of white and red roses and pine sprigs. I brought mom and dad. It has been a bit of a rough week. She's been striking out again, we hear from the floor nurse. Her trusted caregiver is away visiting her family, so we all muscle through. Mom muscles in her own way, but she is in good spirits as we sit by the fire, shooed from the kitchen by my brother in law, the cook, who is whipping together some deliciousness we will all rightly claim we could never equal at a restaurant. She looks from face to face, all adults, but somehow also children and grandchildren, and tries to follow the flow of words. Election Copenhagen, Florida, Colorado Los Angeles Milwaukee. Tool. It's a lot. You can read her effort on her forehead and in the quick shift of eyes from one person to the next. She says nothing. She is already exhausted, I think. We are called to table and begin the great rearrangement, helping mom up and into her walker wheelchair, navigating the rugs and settling her into a chair. Hooray. Hooray. Hooray. We shout, hands together and arms lifting in unison. It has become a beloved pre meal ecumenical prayer perfect for the Jews and atheists among us. Mom looks down at her plate. What am I supposed to do? She asked dad quietly. He mimes eating with a knife and fork. I watch with the keen eye of an anthropologist and the wobbly heart of a daughter. The meal conversation gets animated. Oz is also the tradition. Election Climate Los Angeles, Finland. Election Climate. Writing Law, Law, Law, Climate. Books, movies, books movies. The words whipping around the table ignite all of our spirits. But you can really see Dad's tank refill. This is what he misses. Funny, smart conversation that unpacks the present world. Plus a chance for a little pontificating. He was always good for a little lawyerly pontificating. His face alight, he is holding court. And in that moment mom turns to him and with a sweet smile says slyly, anything else you'd like to say? It was like one of my sister's traditional Christmas crackers had popped. We are all momentarily stunned. There she is, I say. Laughter releases and sweeps around the table like a wave. Our sweet, feisty, sarcastic mother is suddenly there, called forth by the hooray and the calming routine of the table and the meal. Perhaps the voices of children and grandchildren, for sure, by the rhythm of my father's banter. Or not. Maybe it is a random visit of the then mom into the world of the now Mom. Paradoxical lucidity, they call it, those moments when the then and the now crash, and in the shock of that crash, which feels like suspended animation, one can feel the swirl of that's who we love. That's who we lost. That's who we long for. That's who is still there, somewhere, maybe just in our memories and in the crackle of Christmas dinner. Many people hunt for those moments, deliberately setting about to entice the then person to appear, laying out stories and photographs like sweet crumbs. And when the wholly unpredictable moment pops, oh, hello. How are we to interpret it? Or perhaps more importantly, how are we to interpret the moment just after the pop, when, exhausted by the effort, Mom's face goes slack again and she stares absently at her plate. I personally choose to see those moments, the pop of then and now, as a gift, partially because the other way seeing them as losses hammers one's heart into pieces too small to reassemble. My favorite night of Hanukkah is the night we give each other imaginary presents. There are presents we know we can't actually give someone, but joy emanates from the care that goes into the intent. Perhaps this moment is like that, a gift we know we can't actually give ourselves mom back, but that we feel the warmth of the intent so that we don't get kicked fully into grieving all over again. Does she know you? People ask me. I have come to say I never let her not know me. Like how I imagine a Victorian era high society party when a herald announces who is entering the room. Hi, mom, it's Your daughter Ann, with your grandsons, Ben from Los Angeles and Will from Colorado. Aren't you lucky to have such handsome grandsons? Her smile doesn't mean she recognizes us, but I hope it means she feels that these are people who belong in the room and who seem to be fun and loving. It lays a bridge between then and the now. It succeeds in disarming her defenses, which, when she is confused, can include a tight little feisty ball of a fist swiping at you with surprising speed. [00:13:32] Speaker C: As a clinician who has been treating patients with dementia for the past 20 years, Dr. Jason Carloish has heard many stories from caregivers about their loved ones experiencing unexpected moments of connection and communication they thought had been lost, but he never really made much of them. [00:13:48] Speaker A: As a clinician, I would often hear it mentioned by family members, but really paid very little attention to it because it wasn't something I asked about, it was always something. If they volunteered it, I would hear about it, but I never really followed it up or made much sense of it. I just can't tell you how much it was one of these sort of hidden in plain sight right in front of me, things that I was just ignoring out of my own arrogance, ignorance. [00:14:11] Speaker C: Paradoxical lucidity is a term used to describe moments or episodes in people with severe dementia where they experience mental clarity, can connect with and or create meaningful connections with the people around them in a way they are usually unable. [00:14:26] Speaker A: But the term paradox lucidity I think captures that, because when you say something's a paradox, what you're saying is that it's an event that doesn't fit your theory. And so right away you're very skeptical about it. So paradox of lucidity was saying that there are these moments of lucidity that don't fit with advanced dementia because people with advanced dementia aren't lucid. And so if they have a lucid moment, it simply doesn't fit with what it means to have advanced dementia. Hence, as a professional, something we didn't really pay attention to, something we don't really think much about. And in fact, it wasn't until the NIA convened a meeting to look into the phenomena of paradoxical lucidity that I actually began to even think about it in any substantive way. So it's a very long winded answer because it was something that, frankly for me as a physician, the more I thought about it, the more I was embarrassed. I kind of ignored it, particularly the more we studied it. [00:15:17] Speaker C: Dr. Justin Clapp is an anthropologist and co investigator on the study with Dr. Karlowish. [00:15:23] Speaker F: As a social scientist, there are just many aspects of the topic that I find interesting. So the idea that you have people who spend lots of time with individuals who are living with advanced dementia and then see these episodes and interpret them in certain ways that involves how they think about language, how they think about mind, how they think about social interaction, how they interpret context. The way that they interpret all these things could also be culturally variable. So I was interested in seeing how varied they would be and what the sources of that variation would be. [00:15:59] Speaker C: Dr. Karloish and Dr. Clapp's goal with the study was first and foremost to understand what exactly paradoxical lucidity is from the people that have observed it, the caregivers of those with dementia. The study conducted 30 qualitative interviews with caregivers to do just that. These interviews mainly consisted of the caregiver's relationship with the person with dementia, how they communicated with that person, and what the symptoms of that person's impairment currently look like. Instead of directly asking about lucid episodes, these questions aimed to capture the person with dementia's mind as well as how the caregiver perceived that mind. [00:16:35] Speaker A: Do you think she feels pleasure? Do you think she feels fear? Do you think that she feels guilt? Is she able to communicate her needs to you? So they really were thinking a lot about what was their relative experience world and how they knew that and their relative ability to communicate. [00:16:51] Speaker C: This approach was in many ways unique, as Dr. Karlowish and Dr. Clapp explained, because most clinicians look at dementia purely from the perspective of cognition. [00:17:00] Speaker A: If the problem is cognition, there's not a lot there to sort of assess, measure and frankly to talk about. All you're doing is think about what's not there. If you start thinking about dementia not as just a cognitive problem, which it is, but it's not just a cognitive problem. And broaden what you look for, you see it as a disorder of mind. And what you see is the central act of caregiving is struggling to perceive the mind and the other individual from the very beginning, I mean, even in the earliest stages. And that struggle goes on across the whole spectrum of the disease. And this project really opened me up to that's the central struggle of living with dementia and caring for someone with dementia in this way. [00:17:41] Speaker C: The majority of these interviews aim to capture the person with dementia's conscious experience of the world, as well as how caregivers interpret that experience. When understood this way, lucid episodes aren't just an out of the ordinary event. But another way of understanding a person with dementia's experience of the world and the caregiver's relationship to that person. It was only later on when the interviewer would ask about lucid episodes and even then they made sure not to use the phrase paradoxical lucidity or even lucidity. [00:18:10] Speaker F: It was only after we got a really well rounded sense of what their relationship was like that we would bring up this concept of lucidity, but again, without using the term, without using any. [00:18:21] Speaker A: Definition, and avoid what we call the magic word phenomena, which is in addition to not giving them a definition, saying, reading it and saying, so have you witnessed this in the last three months? Yes or no? We also didn't want to use the word. We didn't want to put that magic word out there. Thinking back over the last several months, have you ever witnessed in your relative any moments of unexpected connection or communication that was, I think, luster the way we asked the question. [00:18:47] Speaker F: Having all that information was really useful to us in interpreting their response to that lucidity question because so much of how they interpreted whatever episode they did or didn't describe to us was based on their general understandings of the nature of the person's impairments, the nature of dementia and so on. [00:19:09] Speaker A: And what we found was that even before we got to that question, then we start bringing up these newsing episodes because we're asking them about their relatives, ability to communicate. And the interviewer, same person Melanie, for all the interviews, was trained, noted, but keep on going. And then when you ask that question later, many of them would say, well, as I told you earlier, or should we go back and probe? You know, you mentioned earlier. [00:19:33] Speaker C: The biggest finding Dr. Karlewish and Dr. Clapp gathered from the study was that witnessing episodes of lucidity was very common across the people they interviewed. [00:19:42] Speaker F: The vast majority of the caregivers we talked to did describe an episode that we think reasonably could be called a lucid episode. There were really only three or four that, and even in those cases it was kind of borderline. They did describe an episode, but then they wavered a bit on how unusual it was. About 2/3 of the episodes involved uttering Z's, they were verbal, and about a third involved nonverbal behaviors. So the non verbal behaviors were often very subtle things. So facial expressions that the care healers sound unusual, eye contact that they for some reason found unusual. I believe one involved dancing, which they found very unusual at that point in the person's trajectory of their illness in. [00:20:31] Speaker C: Terms of verbal expressions of lucidity. Dr. Clive explained that the small amount of research on paradoxical lucidity has tended to highlight long, complex sentences that the caregiver otherwise thought was impossible for the person with dementia. However, they found that the verbal episodes these interviewees expressed were often shorter and simpler, but very meaningful in the context of their relationship. [00:20:54] Speaker F: A person with advanced dementia could. Could say an utterance that was fairly short and not necessarily unusual in its length or. Or grammatical sophistication, but was humorous or was evidence that they recognized someone or was evidence of some social capacity that the caregiver thought was gone. [00:21:17] Speaker A: At this point, one gentleman described how his wife would sometimes talk and talk and talk. It didn't really make much sense, even though linguistically it was very interesting, but the sentences were clear, but the content was not connecting. But yet the episode he did describe to us was a sentence she said to him when he was very distressed while trying to handle some bills. And she's sitting there and he's muttering about how distressed he is about all the bills he has to deal with that are complicated medical paperwork. And she says to him, don't worry, you're smart. You'll figure it out. And his point was, he was always the person who managed all those things throughout their relationship. And here she was acknowledging that and really expressing deep empathy and connection. And, you know, his words were, I had my old girl panic. That was what he said. [00:22:06] Speaker C: One of the most important takeaways for both Dr. Carlos and Dr. Clapping was that while caregivers often said they didn't mention episodes of lucidity to doctors, they were extremely meaningful to them, particularly as it related to their role as a caregiver. [00:22:20] Speaker A: Some of them said, because the doctors wouldn't care, or we did wrench it, and the doctor just kind of moved on to something else. Didn't seem very interesting. But what we found was they were very interested, and their interest in them was how the witness in the episodes sustained the active caregiving. In other words, this is why I do what I do, because I think one of the reasons why this happened is because I'm caring for her. [00:22:45] Speaker C: Elizabeth Donnaruma was a participant in one of the interviews for the study. She discussed her experience caring for her late mother, diagnosed with Alzheimer's. [00:22:54] Speaker G: At the end, she considered me her mom. She didn't look at me as a daughter any longer. I mean, there was days that she would come back, but the majority of the time, she considered me her mom. [00:23:07] Speaker C: Elizabeth's description of her role as a caregiver matched with Dr. Carlos and Dr. Clapp's takeaways from the interviews that the act of caregiving was one in which the caregiver attempted to understand and care for the person with dementia's mind. [00:23:20] Speaker G: I spent a large amount of time studying her to make her life better. I always felt if we could get on her level, how much better it would be for her. And no one's going to treat your mother like a daughter does. So Janet did a really good job because we had several caregivers, but Janet was the best that we had. And she could never match what I was doing because she wasn't the daughter. I was the daughter. I knew my mother. [00:23:50] Speaker C: Elizabeth described her mother's quote, unquote, witching hours as between 4 and 8pm in which she would use various strategies to ease her mother's discomfort, such as going for walks outside, visiting her mother's sisters, making meatballs like her mother did when they were kids and playing music. [00:24:07] Speaker G: I can't tell you. I mean, I could send you hundreds of videos of her dancing, like, from in the morning, if I saw that she was spinning out a little bit, I would put the music on and we would dance. Or in the evening, if I saw her, like, get a little bit away from herself, I would put the music on and we would dance, and that would occupy her and it would make her happy. [00:24:32] Speaker C: It was the combination of all of these acts of care that made one moment between her and her mother particularly powerful. Elizabeth described a conversation at the kitchen table in which her mom took her face and asked her who she was. After going back and forth for a second, she remembered that Elizabeth was her daughter and called her Lizzie, Elizabeth's nickname growing up. [00:24:53] Speaker G: And her eyes were so clear, like, that's when I knew she was having some good days because there was actually life in her eyes. It was her look and how she looked at me, like she literally knew it was me. [00:25:07] Speaker C: She said even though her mother couldn't directly communicate with her, she knew what that moment meant. [00:25:12] Speaker G: Love, you know, love. And that she appreciated everything that I did for her. It was only a moment, but it was there. [00:25:29] Speaker C: For both researchers, the results of the study called into question their preconceived understanding of paradoxical lucidity, as well as the nature of the condition of dementia. [00:25:39] Speaker F: I think clearly these kinds of episodes are relatively rare by definition within individual people who have advanced dementia. However, our study is not the only one that has shown that across the population of people with advanced dementia, if you survey or interview caregivers, whether they're laypeople or professional caregivers. It's pretty common. So that all invokes the question, okay, if this is happening in most people with advanced dementia, to what extent is it paradoxical? In other words, to what extent does it disobey our concept of what advanced dementia is? If these kinds of fluctuations are happening in most people, potentially they're part of the condition and the theory of disease needs to account for them. [00:26:36] Speaker A: I think this study adds to, along with other studies of lucidity and emerging consciousness studies, really rethinking how we think about what is dementia. Because I think, as Justin pointed out, that's really what matters to people. But we haven't really, as clinicians and as the society developed a thoughtful, mature language to talk about it beyond these phrases like losing your mind or being gone or others not terribly helpful folk psychology constructs that are more rhetoric than they are useful to help move clinical conversations along. So, simply put, I don't talk about paradoxical acidity anymore. I just think about dementia as a disorder of the mind. And the goal of my clinical workup is across the stages, from the earliest of clinical signs and symptoms to the terminal stage, is to get a sense of how the patient perceives their mind and how the caregiver perceives the mind of the patient. Thinking about paradoxical C doesn't really help me understand the disease. Thinking about it as a disorder of the mind does. So it's made me as a clinician, much more open to asking about episodes of unexpected communication or connection when I see patients with advanced disease who have notable aphasia. It's fascinating. Clinical trials and other kinds of studies change my clinical practice with new diagnostics and therapeutics. But this is one study. Qualitative interviews led by an anthropologist with 30 caregivers have a lot of impact on my clinical practice, akin to a clinical trial or some other typical medical research study. [00:28:24] Speaker D: The research from Dr. Clapp and Dr. Karlowish, I think, really symbolizes what sets the Penn Memory center apart from some other research institutions, and certainly apart from what my expectations were when I joined this group a decade ago. A lot of people think of an Alzheimer's disease research center as working to develop a drug that could treat or cure Alzheimer's disease. And certainly clinical treatments are a major part of our research. But I never thought that this team would have been working with an anthropologist looking at the phenomenon that I had never heard of before that we were initially calling paradoxical lucidity. But this is really important work. And as we heard Time and time again from both researchers and research participants. What feels like a rare occurrence is actually quite common among our cohort. And then it challenges our understanding of what exactly Alzheimer's disease is and what does it mean to be living with dementia. The research into lucidity is really just getting started, and I think it's kicking everything off by blowing up all of our understandings. [00:29:42] Speaker B: Yeah, I. I thought that this was. [00:29:44] Speaker C: Such an interesting study. [00:29:45] Speaker B: You know, I'd heard the term lucidity kind of thrown around a lot just from meetings and being a part of. [00:29:52] Speaker C: The Penn Memory Center. [00:29:54] Speaker B: And when I first started reading about Dr. Karlowish and Dr. Clapp's study, I thought it was so interesting because it is such a. It's a very anthropological look at dementia and how caregivers understanding of their loved one's mind shapes their sense of meaning in the work that they do. And honestly, one thing that really stood out to me from the work was just how smart the methods of the study were. Like the fact that they just conducted these long interviews that were really trying to grasp how does this caregiver understand the way that their person is perceiving the world. Do they feel pleasure? Do they feel pain? Do you think that they're scared? It's really about that person trying to get into the other person's mind. And then these ideas of lucidity come back up. And the idea that it's more about the relationship between the caregiver and the person with dementia, I thought it was really fascinating, and I thought that the interviews were a really great way to bring that out. [00:30:59] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:31:00] Speaker D: You and I both consider ourselves the storytellers first and foremost in a lot of ways. And I love to see there be research value in storytelling as a strategy. You know, if people were filling out surveys or, you know, rate on a scale of 1 to 10, how you felt about X, I don't think we would have gotten the richness of the results that we've seen in the researchers work here. But I think equally important is how obvious the importance and emotional impact of this work was on the caregivers. Some of them, years after experiencing these moments of lucidity, when we heard from the one caregiver, Elizabeth. It's been a while since she recounted that story, but when she recounted the story in the study, that was five years after witnessing her lucid moment, and you could hear in her voice how it still resonated with her after all of this time, it makes me think. [00:32:04] Speaker B: About Ann's story at the beginning of the piece about her mother, because I'd never had somebody in my life with dementia where I've witnessed a lucid moment. But I can only imagine that when you spend so much time with somebody that seems distant from who they used to be, that when there's even just a brief glimpse into that, it must feel like magic or something. It must feel so intense. And I think Anne Basting does such a good job of portraying that. [00:32:35] Speaker D: And I liked the way she phrased it. [00:32:37] Speaker A: She. [00:32:37] Speaker D: She said, there she is. Yeah, that this. Not that her. Her mother had gone away or had become a different person or such, but almost that she had a veil over her. And they got a chance to sort of peek back at the mother they knew and loved. And she also. She set it up nicely, talking about her father, celebrating in the joy of just having thoughtful conversations instead of sort of dealing with the day in, day out tedia of caregiving. And it makes you wonder how much the loved ones living with cognitive impairment may also depend on breaking out of the monotony of just caregiving tasks. And I think that's why we like Anne Basting's beautiful questions. And we talked at the beginning of the episode about how we hope to integrate them into all of the episodes of season three. Among many other things, beautiful questions can break caregivers out of a monotonous routine of providing caregiving tasks and instead engage a loved one, even if they're living with cognitive impairment, in sort of this celebration of wonder. [00:33:50] Speaker B: Yeah. So as I said before, we want to end every episode with a beautiful question and with responses to the previous episode's beautiful questions. In the bonus episode with Anne Basting, the beautiful question that we shared with. [00:34:04] Speaker C: Everyone was, what do you think is a beautiful sound? [00:34:08] Speaker B: Here are some responses. [00:34:11] Speaker H: Hello, my name is Beth. I'm calling from New York, and I think rain is always a beautiful sound. Hi, my name is Evie, and as a misophonic, this is loaded. What's a beautiful sound? I am torn between rain falling on the roof and birds chirping. I don't know if you can hear the jackhammer in the background. Hi. Hi, My name is Greg. I'm calling from Boston, Massachusetts, and I am learning to play my first instrument, and I'm playing the ukulele. And this is the very first thing that I learned how to play, which. [00:34:56] Speaker A: I think is beautiful. [00:34:57] Speaker H: It's the beginning to Let it be by Paul McCartney. And it's C and G. My name is Steve Solinsky. I'm calling from New York, and the. [00:35:09] Speaker A: Sound is of children in a playground. [00:35:14] Speaker H: On an early autumn day. This is Maggie Bendor from Audubon, New Jersey. I chose wind chimes heard in a soft breeze. Hi, my name is Christy Nabe, and I'm calling from Puerto Rico. And a beautiful sound to me is one that causes me to stop and pause. Something that brings forth some form of emotion in me, whether it be sadness, joy, grief, or gratitude, like a baby belly laughing or rain falling or church bells ringing or the sound of ocean waves. My name is Elizabeth. I'm calling in from Boston, Massachusetts. And a beautiful sound to me is the voices and the laughter of my friends and family. I think that when sounds remind you of either a nostalgic time or just somebody or something that you love, they become a lot more beautiful. Thank you. Hi, my name is Leah, and I'm calling from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I would say a sound that I find to be beautiful is the sound of crickets in the summer down south. [00:36:23] Speaker C: Thank you, everyone, for sending in responses to our first beautiful question. Those were amazing. So this week's beautiful question is, what is a food that makes you happy? If you want to respond to that question, you can call into this number, 571-449-6474. So that's 571-449-6474. It'll take you directly to voicemail, and you can say your name, where you're calling from, and your response to that question. [00:36:55] Speaker B: So what kind of food makes you happy, Terrence? [00:36:58] Speaker C: What kind of food makes you happy? [00:37:00] Speaker D: So I talked earlier on about, I think a beautiful sound is the sounds of spring baseball. And it's one because the sounds are nice, but I think mostly because it is a sign of warmth and brighter, sunnier days ahead. And similarly, to me, grilled corn fits that same bill. Corn by itself is fine, but when you get the grill marks on it, when you've got sort of an unhealthy amount of butter added on, a little salt. With apologies to all of our healthy eating tips that we've offered on previous episodes, that, to me is. Is a sign of. Of summer. It's usually associated with, you know, having a family sitting out in front of a setting sun on a beautiful day, hearing lots of birds flying around while we're eating. How about for you? What's, what's a food that makes you happy? [00:37:54] Speaker B: That's a great one. [00:37:55] Speaker C: But this one for me is. [00:37:56] Speaker B: Is really easy. Anybody that knows me knows that I love chocolate chip cookies. Well, not anybody who knows me. [00:38:03] Speaker C: People who work with me probably don't. [00:38:04] Speaker B: Know that my friends and family know this about me, that I actually, I make cookie dough and I save it in my fridge and a few days a week I'll make cookies for dessert. I don't know when I started doing this, but I started doing it when I was a kid for dessert. But they bring me so much joy. And I think it's almost 80% nostalgia at this point. Like it brings me back to my childhood of like watching late night television and eating cookies with a glass of milk. But yeah, it's, it's the same thing you said about the corn where it kind of makes me happy because it brings me back to a certain time or a certain context. [00:38:46] Speaker D: All right, maybe one more time. If people are going to answer this beautiful question of what's a food that brings you joy? How can people participate? [00:38:54] Speaker B: If you want to answer this question and share what kind of food makes you Happy, please call 571-449-6474 and leave. [00:39:06] Speaker C: Your response for us. [00:39:06] Speaker B: We would love to hear them and include them in the next episode. Thanks for listening to this episode of. [00:39:15] Speaker C: The Age of Aging. [00:39:17] Speaker B: The Age of Aging podcast is supported by the Penn Memory center, the University of Pennsylvania Alzheimer's Disease Research center, the Institute on Aging, and the Penn FTD Center. [00:39:27] Speaker D: Contributors include myself and Jake Johnson, as well as Nicolette Calcavecchia, Dalia El Said, Marie Indigniri, Jason Karlewish, Emily Lagent, Meg McCarthy and Megan Sharp. [00:39:41] Speaker B: More information on the stories you heard. [00:39:43] Speaker C: Today can be found in our show Notes and on our website, penn memorycenter.org.