Commitment to a Dementia-Free Society

Your brain is always thinking of something. Even now your brain is thinking of something. Ten seconds later it is thinking of something and 20 s later it is thinking of something. The brain is always thinking continuously. Note that the brain is consuming a large amount of energy to allow the brain to think continuously. Please imagine that you cannot think continuously and how your daily is. Ten seconds later you may forget what you are thinking of. Specifically speaking, you have experienced having forgotten what you are going to do when you go upstairs. Everybody has ever done this and of course I have. However, you must have serious trouble in your daily life if you always forget what you were thinking of 10 s before. The human brain distinguishes between the past, the present, and the future and allows you to think continuously. As you get older, the brain does not allow you to think continuously, and your thinking becomes non-continuous. When this gets worse, you have lost the past and the future and you are in the present. You may be diagnosed with dementia. The brain being continuous is highly related to the energy problem that I stated in Chap. 2 . This is because the human brain is consuming a large amount of energy to allow you to think continuously. The energy problem of the brain is highly related to the issue of how people are living in the super-aging society, which the USA, Europe, and Japan are now facing. No one likes to get dementia, and anybody wishes his or her family not to get dementia. This is why we are discussing with each other and can get to a better way to fact dementia without fear by letting the public know about the brain energy problem. In this chapter, we pursue a possible way to protect the brain, especially the hippocampus which manages short-term memory, and the neocortex which controls long-term memory.