When I have experienced it up close and in my immediate surroundings a number of times, it has made me try to put it in a context that is understandable to me. Brain atrophy is something that occurs naturally but is accelerated by various diseases such as Alzheimer’s. But the decline of our cognitive and mental abilities is also a result of parts of the mental functionality that comes with age not being integrated. But it should not be confused with diseases that cause them to accelerate.
The body and psyche function like our muscles. If they are not used, they atrophy and create conditions that characterize both old age and disease. This makes me believe that it is up to each age to make its integration of our mental growth and deepening. Otherwise we atrophy. If for various reasons we cannot do so, it happens anyway without our participation and then we disappear. First occasionally. In absent-mindedness or temporary moments of emptiness and mental absence. Then longer and longer moments. Finally completely. This reasoning naturally implies that they mutually influence each other. Atrophy is something natural that occurs and accelerates both in the absence of mental activity and by the disease states with which we define them. Mental atrophy affects the functionality of the brain and the functionality of the brain affects our mental ability. Perhaps an absence of our psychic world in our close social relationships indicates an individual need for it to be noticed before it becomes so crowded and congested that it does so without our participation. Something that we discover both in ourselves and others over time. The mental dynamics subside and we experience that people we are trying to establish a human relationship with are no longer present and reflective in a psychological sense, but seem to have frozen mentally and end up in recurring and meaningless repetitions. On a kind of greater scale, it seems as if in this way we as adults return to the place we once came from to mature from within through meditative and psychological self-reflection.