Creative Resilience in Aging

If one looks through a light microscope at a stained section of brain from a patient with Alzheimer’s disease, what one sees very much resembles a painting by the famous American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock. Degenerating neuronal architecture, tau protein tangles, blobs of amyloid detritus — all thrown haphazardly together as if paint was dropped and scattered from above onto the slide. In situ, there is a terrible beauty to the cellular destruction that has taken place, the ravaging that has occurred.