Modern life
Although occasions when your author ejects a mouthful’s worth of his breakfast cereal across the room first thing in the morning are thankfully as rare as hen’s teeth, I have to record that one such occurred yesterday shortly after my butler had brought me my copy of The Times newspaper.
Emblazoned across the top was an article by Greg Hurst, said organ’s Social Affairs Editor, reporting upon a joint scientific project by researchers from Coventry and Oxford universities informing the world that the best way for oldies to maintain their brain’s cognitive functions in the cause of remaining strong, vibrant and active into their later years was to have sex as often as possible.
Apparently (it says here) sexual activity is linked to the secretions of neuro-hormones – that’s the first time I’ve heard what I secrete described thus – such as dopamine or oxytocin that transmit signals in the brain.
The study, published in The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological and Social Sciences, recruited 73 healthy people between the ages of 50 and 83 and asked them to fill in questionnaires upon their lifestyle, including whether they engaged in sexual activity weekly, monthly or never. Thirty-seven said weekly, 26 said monthly and 10 said never.
The group then performed task designed to assess their brain function.
Those who claimed to be most sexually active scored upon average 2 percentage points higher in certain tasks than those who had sex monthly and 4 percentage points higher than those who never had sex.
Although there appeared to be no discernible difference in tests to measure memory, language and attentiveness, according to the report more frequent sexual activity was associated with higher scores in verbal fluency tests, e.g. naming as many animals, or words, as possible beginning with ‘F’ within one minute, or drawing a clock face from memory.
Some years ago my brother told of his legendary episode when, having been to a hospital appointment for something quite different, as he was leaving he was asked to volunteer to take some form of basic cognitive test as an intended means to joining a ‘control’ group with which a set of dementia-sufferers would be compared from time to time.
He was first asked how he had arrived at the hospital that morning and replied that he had done so by car.
Much later, when departing to go home, he couldn’t find his car in the car park and then remembered he had travelled there by bus (not that he went back to inform anybody of this).
He was then set the above-mentioned test of giving the researcher as many words beginning with ‘F’ as possible in 60 seconds.
Somewhat discombobulated by the fact that the first word he could think of was ‘fuck’, he desperately tried to forget that and instead come up with something quite different, whereupon (inevitably?) he kept returning to the same word again and again, in consequence of which he ended up posting a score of just 5 and thereafter began panicking lest he should be asked to desist trying to qualify for the ‘control’ group and instead be asked to join the dementia-suffering one.
Personally speaking, as someone who hasn’t had sex in eight-and-a-half years, I’m broadly content with my remaining cognitive function such as it is, notwithstanding the fact that twice in the past three weeks I walked out of my flat without my keys and had to go down the road to my locksmith in order to arrange to get back into my home after completing whatever it was I set off to do.
