About Brain After 50

My name is Niels Teunis

I have traveled around the world and studied several cultures intensively. I studied a variety of oral history traditions, because I am fascinated by the way people remember their past and talk about it without writing anything down.

I have a Ph.D. in Anthropology and am an expert in oral history.

For one year, I lived and worked in Mali in Africa. Oral history is a rich and live tradition in that country. I have also worked in Papua New Guinea, Peru, Senegal and in South Africa.

You know one thing that I never saw?

Dementia.

I didn’t realize this at first. But in all the non-western countries where I have worked, I have never seen older people get Alzheimer’s, or lose their memories.

Instead, what I saw was elders who knew their family line for many generations back. They knew the history of their people, going back hundreds of years. And they knew all the details.

I loved sitting at their tables, listening to their tales, listening to them telling stories for hours nothing written down, every detail meticulously preserved in their minds.

None of this seemed unusual to me until a few years ago. A neighbor of mine, an older woman, all of a sudden no longer recognized me. As if she drew a total blank when I she saw me. I looked into her eyes and realized that she stared into a dark void.

Have you seen that look? The emptiness in the eyes when all of a sudden someone you know doesn’t recognize you any more? Isn’t that frightening to watch?

I had to find out how the old people around the world avoided Alzheimer’s and dementia. I interviewed experts, I read all the books and articles I could lay my hands on, I went back to some of the places I had visited, and reread my personal diaries about these respected elders.

Here is what I learned:

• Dementia is not inevitable.
• Alzheimer’s is not your fate.
• You can avoid memory loss and senior moments.

You can live freely and independently for the rest of your life. Your children won’t have to worry whether you will burn your house down. Nor will anybody have to talk with you about revoking your driver’s license, because you will be as safe on the road as you are today.

Best of all, this is not rocket science. You already have everything available to keep your mind alive, to stay sharp, to prevent memory loss. After all, if old people in some of the poorest countries in the world can keep their memory strong, you won’t have to go out and buy pills, take courses, do silly games or pay for other kinds of mental crutches. You can improve your memory all by yourself…

Let me show you how …