Retirement Tips — Cybercycle and Pee for Brain Health

A study published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine revealed that cycling in a virtual reality improves cognitive function. ‘Cybercycling’ involves a stationery bike with an attached videogame-type screen. The rider must navigate virtual turns and avoid digital obstacles. A related (or not) study found that waiting too long to pee can addle your brain.

The Healthy Aging and Neuropsychology Lab and Department of Psychology at Union College evaluated over 100 riders, aged 58 to 99. I’m impressed that someone 99 can ride a bike at all, much less cybercycle. The control group rode regular stationery bikes with no cyber activity.

The people on the cyberbikes had ‘significantly better executive function…’ i.e. ‘planning, working memory, attention, and problem solving.’ They also had 23% less progression to Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). The only difference between the two groups was the cyber aspect; frequency, intensity, duration—all were the same. The conclusion: requiring riders to interact with a cyber environment—to pay attention and make decisions as they ride—helps keep their gray matter healthy.

An inverse study conducted by a professor of neurology at Brown University found that pain contributes to MCI. For their work on withholding urination, Peter Snyder and his team won a 2012 MSNBC Weird Science award and kudos from those who gave out the 2011 Ig Nobel Prizes.

Subjects drank lots of water but waited to pee until their eyeballs were popping out. Their cognitive abilities were measured throughout via simple computer tasks. The research showed that ‘the painful need to urinate’ impairs driving just as much as 24 hours of sleep deprivation or intoxication just shy of the legal limit. The study gives new meaning to the ditty: ‘Here’s to good old Brown, drink it down, drink it down.’

We can conclude that you’d be wise to make an executive decision to visit the loo before climbing onto your cybercycle. Otherwise the pain from your bursting bladder will undo all the good work your interactive exercise would have accomplished.

Getting back to that cybercycle… I’ve devised a group of cyber activities that you can use with your stationery bike to improve your executive function and prevent MCI. I’m here to serve.

Cyber Vacuuming

This cybercycle app simulates the process of vacuuming your home; it’s highly realistic. As you cycle, you must steer your way around your spouse, who is napping in a recliner with a separate footrest. Ding that footrest and you lose 50 points, but if your spouse fails to wake up during your ride, you earn bonus credit. If you suction the cat’s tail into the vacuum, you lose 100 points. Likewise for the fringe on the oriental rugs. This app is available with several choices of vacuums. The Dyson comes with automatic upgrades.

The Stairmaster

Achieve the benefits of a traditional Stairmaster with this cyber version. Navigate up and down flights of stairs, being careful to avoid such obstacles as misplaced footwear, the dog and the cat. Trip over a shoe or step on any tails or paws and lose 50 points (per appendage). Make the trip with a fully loaded laundry basket for 100 bonus points. Opt for stairs without a handrail and earn an additional 50. This app comes with a time trial option. When you’ve mastered the basics, compete against your own best performance.

Cyber Shopping

Do your grocery shopping on the cybercycle! Key in your store to update sale prices in the software. Cycle through the aisles, pick up items on your list and put them into your cyber basket. Be careful not to bump into the woman in the handicapped cart or knock over the floor stand full of cookies or you’ll lose your cyber discount. Earn bonus points for lifting heavy items on the bottom shelf or reaching ones at the back of the top shelf. Score over 500 points, and your order will be waiting at the real store to take home.

Rush Hour Challenge

This cybercycle app features an Interstate at rush hour. The program puts you in a virtual traffic jam on a familiar highway. Watch out for the teen texting in the lane to your right. She’s about to drift into your car, but you’re the one who will lose points. The road warrior in front of you is going to stop short because he just spilled coffee on his laptop. Not challenging enough? Your spouse forgot to fill the tank and you’ll run out of gas in five minutes. Best to work your way over to the slow lane.

These are just a few of the challenging cybercycle applications that will help you preserve your brain power while you get your requisite dose of daily exercise. All you have to remember now is: pee first.

Retirement Issues—Bad Luck Chain Emails

This post is about one of my pet peeves: those emails that claim you must forward them to 7 friends (or 6 or 10—never 2 or 3) within 5 minutes (or 6 or 10—or sometimes 2 or 3) or else you will have bad luck for the next 7 years (or… you get the idea.) I’m sure you’ve all received these. They’re similar to the almost-as-annoying ones promising good luck if you follow the instructions.

Retirement seems to have afforded some of my former colleagues the time to dabble more in predictions, threats and dire consequences. They must think it also affords me the time to respond to these, but I trash them within 5 seconds (or 6 or 10). News flash to my email world: I’m not that superstitious. I also don’t hate my friends enough to pass on the negative karma. And not the bogusly positive karma, either.

Careful readers will have noticed the word “that” inserted before “superstitious” in the paragraph above. This means that though I don’t believe anything will happen to me for deleting these messages, I still have anxiety pangs as I do it. Thank you so much for the mental anguish, so-called friends who send them to me.

The one I received today was about horoscopes. My “friend’s” subject line was: “Frightening how accurate for most.” More frightening was that she failed to see how many contradictions were embedded within these scopes, guaranteeing at least a whiff of accuracy. Her brief note read: “Can’t hurt – try it!” (Pascal’s wager anyone?)

The instructions in the message included: “Below are true descriptions of zodiac signs. Read your sign and then forward it on, with your zodiac sign on the subject line.” Since my friend’s sign was not in her subject line, she must have been so worried about getting the message forwarded on time that she didn’t even read it.

The instructions continued: “This is the real deal; try ignoring or changing it and the first thing you'll notice is having a horrible day, starting tomorrow morning — and it only gets worse from there.”
I inferred from this that I had only until the next morning to forward or be damned. That was Monday. You’re reading this the following Saturday (or later), so I’ve probably had a terrible week.

What we really need here is a message that goes back to the person who sent us the email. As a service to my fellow retirees who have better things to do than annoy their buddies but would like to cover their bases, just in case, here it is.

Dear friend, who is in imminent danger of becoming a former friend:

Please recall the recent message you sent me wherein you put the chain email monkey onto my back to save your own skin. I will not be a party to passive-aggressive harassment, thinly-veiled self-promotion or otherwise non-constructive clogging of the Internet pipe. If you do not retract this message immediately, here’s what will happen.

·       Every appliance in your kitchen will malfunction, starting with the InSinkErator, but only after you have filled it with onion skins and shrimp tails. This will begin a cascade of problems. The day after the repairman (who bills by the visit) has fixed the first item, the second one will go down, and so on. Best not to plan any dinner parties for a few months. You might also want to put your favorite take-out on speed dial.

·       Your alarm clock will wake you at 5 am when you want to sleep in and will fail to go off when you have to catch that early morning, discounted, non-changeable flight to Barbados. The one that was taking you to the fixed-date condo-swap.

·       Whatever teeth you have left will begin to fall out of your mouth one week after having them professionally cleaned. That could be 6 months or a year from now. Two words: Delta Dental.

·       You will misplace all of your credit cards, except the one with the $300 limit and the one with the 24 percent interest rate. When you try to replace the missing ones, you’ll learn that your identity has been stolen by the nephew of a woman from Nigeria who offered to cut you in on a scheme to make thousands of dollars, but you deleted her message.

·       Your email address will be mysteriously added to a network of porn sites. Not to worry. Your credit card with the 24 percent rate will get billed only if you accidentally click thru.

·       Finally, don’t even ask what I have planned for your bathroom.

Oh. I forgot to mention. This will happen “starting tomorrow morning—and it only gets worse from there.” Have a nice day.

Retirement Updates—Sex, Meds and Pain

A collection of recent news items makes me glad I’ve reached retirement age. For one thing, I don’t have to worry about contraception anymore. This is fortunate, since Pfizer just recalled one million packages of several of its popular birth control pills. The pills were put into the daily dispenser packets in the wrong order. That means your hormone levels would be all wack-a-doodle, “increasing the likelihood of unintended pregnancies.” Ya think?

If I were on those pills, I’d be pregnant sure as God made little green apples (and Pats don’t reign in Indianapolis). As it is, I need one of those days-of-the-week containers just to keep my vitamins straight. A manufacturer screw up on the sequence of birth control pills would have meant preggers for certain. Not to mention that my hormone levels are already wack-a-doodle. If I had wack-a-doodle on steroids, my husband would be cleared for instant sainthood—and he’s Hindu.

If you’re feeling smug because you (or your partner) wear a raincoat for protection, keep reading. Some 1.35 million condoms distributed by the ANC in South Africa also were just recalled because the condoms broke during intercourse. That doesn’t mean that ones in the U.S. will also let the rain in (or out), but would you want to take a chance? Just sayin’. That leaves the rhythm method, which, I’m told, will be covered by all insurance plans, regardless of who is elected President in November.

A related news item (or not) is that Japan’s Health and Welfare Ministry projects that its population will decrease 30% by the year 2060 and be aging rapidly—seniors will then account for about 40%. Life spans will be longer (almost 91 for women by 2060) and birth rates lower (1.35 per woman by then). The report was issued just before the Pfizer recall, so expect adjustments to these figures when the next projections come out.

Maybe the Japanese need to practice yoga. My husband drew my attention to a Nightline feature on a new book on the benefits of yoga. The only one he remembered is that yoga increases sex drive. The cobra pose in particular is supposed to improve blood flow to the pelvis, leading to better “yogasms.” Will more yogasms lead to more offspring? Hard to say…

There’s good news for retirees on the medical front. A drug created to treat skin cancer has been shown to reverse the symptoms of Alzheimer’s in mice. More specifically: scientists at Case Western Reserve University have found that bexarotene improves memory function and social behavior in laboratory mice.

I’m a little fuzzy on how they were able to measure these improvements. I’m picturing the control group scampering around willy-nilly, squealing “Who moved my cheese?” Or maybe the ones on the test protocol found the cheese even when it was in the researcher’s pocket.

You have to wonder how they assess social behavior in mice. Are there recordings of the males murmuring, “Hey there, Minnie. Wanna see my etchings?” I did note something in the report about the mice building nests from tissue paper. Isn’t that what they do when they’re pregnant? Hmmm. Maybe they were on Pfizer’s birth control pills. I don’t want to even think about broken mouse condoms.

Another gender-related item: women feel pain more than men do. These findings fly in the face of beliefs that women have a higher pain threshold than men. In a study of 11,000 hospitalized patients with various ailments, women self-reported acute pain more than men did. However, since most nurses were female, men may have sucked it up to seem more macho. One pain women definitely tolerate better is a pain in the butt, especially when it’s caused by men trying to seem macho.

You are now up to date on all the important developments having to do with sex, meds and pain. I aim to serve. But not to learn the cobra pose…

Retirement Issues — Bio IDs for Retirees

India is implementing the first-ever universal biometric ID program, which will assign a Unique Identification Number (UID) to each resident as a national proof of identity. The UID links three pieces of biometric data: a photo of the face, iris scans and fingerprints. The program aims to help the poor gain access to benefits and subsidies. India presently has dozens of ID types, virtually none of which can be used country-wide and most of which are not available to the poor.

Similar ID trial balloons have been floated in Britain and the US over the past decade. Not surprisingly, UID plans have many critics who think Big Brother is already watching us too closely. With a little thoughtful tweaking, we seniors can make a UID work to secure our access to benefits as we age. Forget fingerprints and iris scans. We have more appropriate ways to uniquely identify us using biometrics, ways that will not put us at risk of government meddling.

I’m using as my guide Wikipedia’s definition: Biometric identifiers are the distinctive, measurable characteristics used to identify individuals. And further: The two categories of biometric identifiers include physiological and behavioral characteristics. You just know there’s a treasure trove of possibilities in this. Here are some of my suggestions.

Chemical Breath Analysis

Odors (or odours, if you’re a Brit) are an acknowledged biometric. Per the site griaulebiometrics.com: “…each organism produces a given odour that is characteristic to that organism.” I’d never suggest using body odor as a UID, but let’s face it, older folks have some of the most distinctive breath aromas on the planet. A CIA agent would have to be really perverse to probe that data out of idle curiosity.

Plaster Casts

Equally curiosity-proof is a plaster cast of your bunion. Though I’ve not conducted a scientific study, I’m quite certain that every bunion is unique. What’s that? You don’t have bunions? Then use the profile of your fallen arch when it’s placed on a special foot pad. What again? Your arches haven’t fallen and you have no bunion? Liar, liar, pants on fire. Unless you've spent your life barefoot on the beach, you can’t have reached seniordom without at least a hint of one or the other of these problems. However, moving on...

Spot Patterns

The patterns made by our liver (or old age) spots provide yet another biometric for a UID. The ones on your face or on your hands provide the most discrimination. If you opt for this biometric, you should overlay the behavioral (or behavioural) test of what you think the patterns represent. It’s a sort of Rorschach for seniors. When the ID is set up, you input your interpretation into the database. Anyone with a similar spot pattern will need to perceive it in your same quirky way in order to coopt your ID.

The Art of Earwax

Those with excess earwax have an additional option, that being a Pantone match to the color (or colour) of your wax. Important! Be sure to use the Pantone code for coated stock, not uncoated. Those who have used this color tool know that you get not-so-subtle variations in shades depending on the paper you print on. Likewise for your wax match. The earwax biometric has an added benefit of improving your hearing each time you are screened for a UID match.

The Lettuce Test

This ID measures how long you take to chew a three by five inch lettuce leaf. It’s predicated on the fact that many seniors have dentures, caps or other paraphernalia that render chewing food such as lettuce a challenge. Be sure to indicate which type of lettuce was used for your standard. If you’re timed using iceberg when your ID is set up, but they test you on Bibb or romaine, you’ll never pass as yourself.

Meandering Ratio

The final metric is complicated and therefore unique. You walk from point A to point B, ten feet away. A computer records you and calculates as follows: Ten divided by how many steps you take times your sway (inches from leftmost point to rightmost). This number is divided by your height in inches times your weight in pounds, and that is divided by the circumference of your right thigh. The result is your meandering ratio.

There you have it. Six alternatives to fingerprints and iris scans for a senior-friendly biometric ID system. The more we combine these together, the more secure our identity from pretenders. And the less likely some nosy government functionary will go out of his way to track our every move. Isn’t technology great?