← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Reversing the Ageing Process
00:27:52
Now where have I put the car keys? A Japanese neuro-scientist believes a regular brain...
Loading summary
Transcript12 lines
- [00:00]
A
You have downloaded from our own correspondent. This edition is the latest one broadcast on BBC Radio 4. And here to introduce it is Kate Ady.
- [00:09]
B
Hello. Outsmarted and humiliated by someone in her 80s. We're at a brain gym in Japan where they say the aging process can be put into reverse. The farmer suicides in India. Why? They highlight a crisis in the countryside and a decline in village life. Luxury suites, well stocked fridges, 148 TV channels. The surreal world of a high security prison in Saudi Arabia. And hitchhiking might not be the right of passage it once was here. But no one, it seems, has told the snakes. On the Caribbean island of Aruba, the Italian authorities are again demanding that the European Union do more to help manage the tide of migrants arriving on their shores. Last weekend, naval and Coast Guard vessels rescued some 6,000 people from the Mediterranean. The surge in the number of boats trying to make the crossing was put down to fine weather and benign sea conditions. It's believed more than 1700 migrants have died this year in the waters between Libya and Italy. The UN Security Council is to discuss the Italian call for help early next week. Daniel Gordon's been to one of the Sicilian ports where the arrival of migrants has become an almost daily occurrence.
- [01:24]
A
I found the spot where some of the migrant boats are laid to rest. Their graveyard is a patch of bare concrete tucked inside the Porta Pozzallo. The decrepit fishing vessels used to ferry the migrants from the other side of the Mediterranean lie at awkward angles on the ground here. Their names are daubed on their sides in bright colors, the Arabic lettering peeling off their cabin roofs rounded like giant children's bath toys, their hulls painted in tasteful shades of light blue and red. I got talking to a man called Giuseppe who runs a cargo company at the port. You see those boats at the back? He said, pointing towards the perimeter fence. Which would you say is cleaner? The one on the left must have been out of the water for months, if not years. But nobody had ever called Lost Property about the belongings its final load of passengers had left behind. On the deck. I could see a black rucksack, a man's jacket fraying at the seams, and a child's shoe on which you could just about make out some brownish love hearts embroidered on it. Dozens of grubby, faded orange life jackets had spilled over the side onto the ground. My mind whirred with the possibilities. Did that mean there'd been a false alarm and that help had arrived before the life jackets were needed? Or that the Craft had foundered before they'd had time to put them on. In comparison, the boat next to it looked almost fit to return to sea. The migrant's luggage had been tidied into three enormous white sacks, so huge that only a hydraulic lift could move them. Giuseppe told me that he and his staff cleaned that boat up out of respect. After it had been brought to shore, it was discovered there'd been 46 young people locked in below deck. They'd had no air down there, he said. By the time we found them, they've been dead for four days. We worked all through the night without a break to bring the bodies out. We cut holes in the deck to let the stench out. That smell, he said, his eyes welling up with tears, will stay with me for the rest of my life. Do you know why it's so rare to find bodies when one of these boats sinks? He asked. It's because many of the migrants can't swim. So when they realize the ship's going down, they cling onto the side for dear life. Then rigor mortis sets in and they're joined to the boat at the bottom of the sea forevermore. A friend of mine is a diver in Lampedusa. He saw it for himself. Time and again we hear that the migrants real aim is to reach Northern Europe. Italy is just a transit point, as it offers the closest and most accessible European shore. They have no intention of staying here. Indeed, some are even reported to have booked and paid for taxis to meet them at their intended landing points. So they can be taken straight to Italy's borders with its richer northern neighbours. And the Italian authorities are said to be quite happy to turn a blind eye. But when the ships break down or when the Coast Guard intervenes, the media arrive and the bureaucratic machine has to process them. Then the migrant's choice is to try to stay here or be repatriated. Before visiting the ship's graveyard, I'd been to a foster home in the nearby town of Noto, where a group of Egyptian teenagers had been living for two years. The seven youngsters I met were obviously well cared for and integrated into their community. They'd learned to speak not exactly Italian, but the Sicilian dialect, and had all adopted names like Ciccio and Roberto, rather than the Arabic names they'd arrived with. Now there are so many people coming from North Africa virtually every day, it's clear that Italy can't possibly offer that sort of hospitality to all of them. It's not that we don't want the migrants here. Giuseppe told me back at the docks. We've taken their natural resources, so we do owe them. He pointed again at the group of rotting hulks at the water's edge. More than 150of them have come into this harbour alone, he said, and every port in Sicily now has its own collection of migrant boats. How can Italy possibly deal with all these people by itself? He asked, adding, you're a journalist. Please tell the world we need help.
- [05:32]
B
And that's Daniel Gordon. Saudi Arabia watchers may have been surprised in recent weeks by a burst of decision making from the new ruler, King Salman. They've seen not only an uncharacteristically muscular military intervention in neighbouring Yemen, but also an announcement about who will eventually succeed him. He's named the crown prince Mohammed bin Nayef as his successor. The land he'll eventually rule over is of course one of the most ultra conservative Muslim countries in the world. It's frequently accused of fostering the ideology that fuels Islamic extremism and of repressing its women and anybody else who voices objections to its rulers. The state argues it's actually reforming ISIS and Al Qaeda militants. And Barbara Pletocher, recently in the capital Riyadh, says it also claims it's opening doors for women.
- [06:22]
C
We call the prisoners guests, said my guide, a petite woman in a black robe and partial face veil with lively eyes and a quick step. Thus began my tour of a high security prison near Riyadh. She was showing me around what she called a hotel, a place where specially selected prisoners could spend time with their families. A gift for good behavior, she called it. There were luxury suites with massive TV screens, a walled in football pitch and a satisfaction survey to fill out on departure. We keep the fridges in each room stocked with drinks and sweets, she informed me. The prison hospital was another highlight. The chief doctor, my guide, this time brimming with enthusiasm as he whisked me through the spotless operating theater and explained with pride the electronic registration system for patients. My visit seemed directed at dispelling reports of human rights abuses and showcased the kingdom's rehabilitation program for members of the so called Islamic State or isis, and other extremist groups. The world I entered felt increasingly surreal as we paraded through wide empty corridors, painted a soothing lavender and the solitary confinement cell with 148 TV channels. Stopping by the prisoner painter who displayed his latest art portraits of the new monarch, King Salman bin Abdulaziz. Saudi Arabia, it seemed to me, is a country where you're never quite sure what you're seeing is real. Or what you'll find hidden behind the gates like those of a Riad villa that opened the door to a health club with a trendy California vibe. A running track wound its way around the lovely lush green grounds. Inside was the latest in modern exercise equipment, a smoothie bar and a chalkboard with inspirational quotes. In a country where women must get permission from a male legal guardian to attend university or travel abroad, this female fitness centre offered its clients an extreme workout program called CrossFit, a combination of weightlifting, gymnastics and cardio exercise. Whenever we get inquiries about CrossFit, it's from men, said the instructor, and they're taken aback that this program is for women. But mindsets are starting to be more open. Women have become more and more visible, the project manager of a women's foundation told me. She was talking about the growing number joining the workforce and the appointment of women to a government advisory body. You see them working in shops as clerks, she said. You, you see them on television in the Shura Council. Psychologically, this has helped society accept a different role for women. That role doesn't include driving. There's still a ban on that. Two women were recently detained on terrorism charges for trying to do so in protest, although they've since been released. But in a seeming paradox, there have also been reports that the Shura Council has recommended relaxing restrictions on women driving. This is a very difficult country to assess, mused a middle aged female professional. One day you're given a certain allowance, the second day it's forbidden without warning because of internal politics. There doesn't seem to be any such confusion when it comes to wayward sons, at least not at a rehabilitation center connected to the prison. The director emphasized that the program uses a scientific approach based on extensive research to deal with the social, psychological and religious causes of extremist thinking. Most rehab is about deviating behavior, he told me. But. But this is about deviating ideology. We need to use whatever tool we have because we're competing with the extremist groups who try to take them back. A fair point and impressive results, he claimed. Nearly 90% of those treated had returned to normal life. If they do not, he said, we assess what went wrong, what we missed. But is there always a solution, I wondered. And are they asking all the right questions? What about politics? The kingdom has used wide ranging terrorism laws to repress human rights activists and those calling for peaceful political reform. In fact, suspected jihadis get much gentler treatment than many supporters of a constitutional monarchy, an analyst who follows Saudi Arabia told me. I spoke with one of the rehab graduates. He praised the center for helping him see that ISIS was wrong about jihad or holy war. Was ISIS also wrong about setting up an Islamic state? I asked him. We are currently living in an Islamic state, he replied, in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Anyone who wants to see what a true Islamic state is should look at this land and how it coexists with everyone in complete justice and moderation.
- [10:44]
B
Barbara Plett Usher the number of suicides among farmers in India is becoming an increasingly political issue. Both the ruling BJP and the opposition Congress have spoken about it in recent days. Quite how many cases there have been is hard to pin down. One government organisation estimates that more than 2,270,000 farmers killed themselves between the years 1995 and 2011. Indian academics and police officials as well as politicians have argued for years about whether these deaths are most strongly linked to poverty, caste, failed monsoons, dangerous chemicals or even newly introduced genetically modified crops. And skeptics point out there are in fact more suicides in professions other than farming. But what can't be denied is that there is a strong relationship between suicide and debt. And Mark Talley says the chains of financial obligation which fall on many Indian farmers aren't easily broken.
- [11:43]
D
Fourteen years ago, the widow of Nangapa, a farmer in South India, told me how her husband had said one night that he was going to discuss his financial plight with a village elder. When he failed to return, the village mounted a search for him, but it wasn't until dawn that he was found hanging from a tree. The other day, I was reminded that Nangapa had died in vain. When television channels showed Gajendra Singh, a farmer from north India, hanging from a tree in the very heart of Delhi. His noose was a gamcha, or cotton cloth North Indian farmers tie round their heads. Nangapa's noose had been a cotton cloth too, a lungi, worn as a lower garment in South India. When I recently asked Hemant Kumar, the leader of a farmer's movement in the region where Nangapa died, whether his death or all the other suicides had made any difference, he replied, nothing has changed for farmers. Farmers get into debt because each year they need to borrow money to buy seeds and fertilizers. Back in 1969, Indira Gandhi nationalized banks to provide farmers credit. But the banks are so corrupt and inefficient that farmers are driven into the hands of moneylenders who charge exorbitant rates of interest. Haymond confirmed that farmers still have to pay bribes to apply for a loan, and then the bank staff keep some of the loan when it's sanctioned. Furthermore, banks are so bureaucratic, farmers can never be sure when their loans will come through. The moneylender gives them cash on the spot and pays the loan in full, so farmers are certain they will have the money to finance the next crop. Farmers earnings are restricted by markets beset by corruption, middlemen and archaic regulations restricting where they can sell their produce. It had been hoped that international retailers would come in and provide the storage and supply chains Indian farmers need and India has been unable to supply for years. Small shopkeepers successfully kept them out, but now the government has ruled against them. The foreign retailers don't seem interested in developing the Indian market. The French firm Carrefour has pulled out of India and there's no sign of Tesco going ahead with its planned investment. Farmers distress is part of a wider malaise affecting the Indian countryside. It's shown in the stream of migrants pouring into already overcrowded cities. The government has an employment guarantee scheme, but it only provides a limited number of workdays. It's NGOs who are trying to generate regular employment to enable villagers to stay at home. One of the NGOs is the Barefoot University of Telonia in the desert state of Rajasthan. When I visited Telonia recently, I discovered the founder, banker Roy, sitting cross legged on the floor of his office like a benign Buddha, keeping watch over the university's activities. I say keeping watch because Banka insists that Telonia's activities should be controlled by its barefoot students and teachers, not by him. They are the villagers with little or no formal education who Telonia brings together with professionals to adapt skills and technologies which they can apply in their villages. Barefoot professionals have emerged in many fields, including education and health services, two areas where help is urgently needed. In rural India, I was taken aback to see a barefoot dentist at work in Telonia. Banka himself did not come from a barefoot background. He had what he described as the most elitist, expensive, snobbish private education any Indian could have. But he turned against that and went barefoot when he worked with villagers as an unskilled labourer for 5 years. 44 years in Telonia have taught him to scorn the business models of development agencies as part of their effort to promote traditional village schools. They make puppets at Telonia, and Banka takes a delight in telling visitors that some of them are made from the recycled paper of World bank reports. Barefoot engineers who install and maintain solar panels have been so successful that countries around the world send women to be trained at Telonia I watched one class of women trainees who came from everywhere Vietnam via Africa to the Dominican Republic. The government now plans to build a solar energy capacity of 100,000 megawatts. Bunker fears the planners will go for big plants without without also leaving room for small plants and single panels installed by barefoot engineers. I have seen many original schemes for developing India evolved by NGOs, but rarely has the government replicated them. So I fear Bunker will be right and an opportunity to at least slow down the decline of India's villages will be lost.
- [17:05]
B
Mark Talley in Delhi now thanks in part to advances in medical science, lives are now longer than they've ever been. In the 10 years between 2002 and 2012, the number of people aged 90 and over has grown by more than 30%. Keeping the mind active and engaged is the biggest challenge facing aging populations. People living in Japan have the longest life expectancy in the world. Japanese women, on average, are expected to live until they're 87. Adam Shaw has been there to meet a neuroscientist who believes he can help an aging population keep brains active and dementia at bay.
- [17:44]
E
In the town of Sendai, the largest city in the Tohoku region in Japan, there are a million people going about their daily lives. One of them, Ms. Endo Tokiko, who won't mind me revealing that she's in her 80s, is almost certainly telling everyone around her how she defeated, conquered, trounced and thoroughly overwhelmed an Englishman almost half her age. What's more, she will no doubt explain how she did it with ease, while the short, bald Englishman from the BBC sweated with effort, more of which later. I was in sendai to meet Dr. Ryoto Karashima. He's a Japanese neuroscientist whose work involves mapping the regions of the brain which control emotion, language, memorization and cognition. He's well known in academic circles, but more unusually, he also has a fan club of millions of adults and children who know him as the animated professor figure in the Brain game created by the computer company Nintendo. His widespread fame started with the publication of his book train youn Brain 60 Days to a better brain. It sold more than two and a half million copies, led to a series of other books, and piqued the interest of the Japanese gaming company Nintendo, which turned his program into a game and that itself sold 19 million copies. Based at Tohoku University's Smart Aging center, he now works with groups of elderly people to see how to keep their brains active for longer. Kawashima believes that brain plasticity the ability of the brain to change not only exists in young people, but it can even exist in the brains of dementia sufferers. One of his concerns is that as we increasingly rely on computers, our brains get lazy. The modern world, in other words, is making our brains duller. Although there is some skepticism amongst other professionals in this area, his work is not only popular, it could be helpful not just for dementia sufferers, but for us all. He thinks that simple exercises repeated often can help reverse some of the aging process of some brain functions. Doing simple additions and subtractions doesn't just make us better at maths, he says. It also helps us remember names where we put our car keys and will help our brains to become generally more expert at everything we ask them to do. Three times a week, a group of the older Sendai residents make their way to Dr. Kawashima's brain gym to give their mental facilities a tightly monitored workout. And the other day I joined them. Wearing a brain monitor, I was to go up against Kawashima's star pupil. Ms. Endo. Tokiko sat next to me. She was composed, self possessed, unruffled, unmoved and unemotional. She also stared ahead, unsmiling, and was uncommunicative. Dr. Kawashima then said, you may turn over your paper and begin a phrase I hadn't heard for many years. I rushed through the first 10 questions quietly, confident that this was so much faster than I'd expected to do. I was going to be an easy winner. I Therefore almost missed Ms. Tokiko turning her second page. I didn't want to look across at her, as it would slow me down, but I couldn't imagine she'd finished one page already. I finished the first section and risked glancing across at my opponent, who was now rushing towards the end as I had barely finished the first half. With an almost imperceptible smile, she placed her pencil down and looked at Dr. Kawashima. No words were needed, but Dr. Kawashima shouted them anyway. Ms. Tokiko had won. I genuinely couldn't believe I had been so roundly trounced. What's more, an analysis of our brain patterns during the exercise revealed something even more shocking. Whilst I had used all my mental guns, lighting up the brain monitor like Piccadilly Circus, Tokiko's brain monitor showed how she was only using a very small part of her faculties. In other words, Dr. Kawashima explained to me, not only had I been beaten badly, but my opponent had done it with one arm tied behind her back. She had only used a fraction of her brain power whilst I had had to bring everything I had to the game. The fantastic performance, he said, was the result of 15 minutes a day brain training. I have just had to look up the name of my opponent, but she no doubt remembers mine to this very day. And that may also be a sign of which one of us is regularly doing our little brain training exercises.
- [22:37]
B
And that was Adam Shaw. Now, hitchhiking might not be the popular activity it once was, but no one seems to have told the snakes of Aruba. This Dutch island in the Caribbean has a lot of them, boa constrictors in particular, an especially formidable breed that can grow more than 4 yards long. And it seems they feel that for getting around the island, crawling is not the way to go. The car is a much more efficient form of transport. The authorities, though, are not impressed. The snake population is growing and becoming a bigger menace by the day. So as Rob Crossen's been finding out, war's been declared.
- [23:15]
F
This might be the Caribbean of tourist dreams, but from where I'm standing, there's not a rum punch or sun lounger in sight. Rudely protruding, phallic shaped cacti, dense sable, brown scrub, immense boulders and the odd skittish goat surround me in this arid landscape that looks like something more akin to Australia's Northern Territory. The fact that snakes, boa constrictors to be precise, are, according to my guide Robert, absolutely everywhere here in the Arakok national park in Aruba only compounds the sense that this is no relaxing beach break in paradise. In fact, I'm on a wild island with an invasive species far more deadly than the slew of cruise ship passengers meandering around the myriad duty free stores in the capital, Oranjestad. Somebody back in the 90s had some boas as pets, Robert tells me as we continue to walk through the park, the insistent Caribbean sun casting a piercing heat upon us. They probably couldn't afford to feed them. Fully grown boas need live chickens and things like that, so this person just released them and they seem to just love Aruba. They're thriving here with boas giving birth to live young, some 30 to 50 babies a year. It didn't take long for the snakes to multiply at a dizzying rate with devastating effects for bird life on the island. By some estimates, around 17,000 birds are devoured each year by the snakes. But what nobody could understand until recently was just how the snakes were reaching the furthest corners of Aruba so quickly since changing its status in 1986 to become an autonomous country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Aruba has become a picture postcard retreat for mainly American visitors who come to experience the vanilla sand beaches, cerulean waters and luxurious all inclusive hotels. But even the coastal hotels far away from the wilderness of Aricok have been visited by the boas in recent years. It turns out that these creatures have found a simple yet effective way to traverse the island. They hitchhike. They love how warm car engines are, Robert tells me. So they climb into them and they end up getting driven all over the island. The solution that the park rangers have come up with to tackle the problem is to announce sporadic national snake hunt days. We give US$10 to anyone who can bring us a boa that's still alive, I'm told. Then we give them to the government and they destroy them. You don't get any money for a dead snake though. We couldn't believe how many snakes were being brought to us the first time we had a hunt day, one guy came in with a sack full of about 30 snakes, all still alive. It's difficult for me as I walk this park every day. I'm really scared of them. I'm glad it's not long until I can retire. Later that day, despite not having seen any snakes during my walk with Robert, I decide to indulge in a more conventional Aruban tourist pursuit, namely taking a boat ride out to snorkel among the parrotfish and other tropical curiosities that swarm, dart and glide around the warm waters off the Aruban coastline. But even here, it didn't take long for the subject to return to the boa problem. Anthony, my skipper, whom I was sailing with on his bright red vessel named the Tranquillo, rummaged for his phone when I mentioned the walk in arrow cock I'd had that morning. You have to see this film, he told me. And so, shielding the screen from the sun, I watched a shakily filmed piece of footage which showed an understandably angry looking, full sized boa get attacked and slowly killed by Anthony's three Jack Russell dogs. I was just driving along a side road when the snake started crawling out of the engine and onto the bonnet. Anthony told me it was crazy. I pulled over, kicked the snake off the car onto the ground and the dogs just went for it. A dead snake does, of course, mean that Anthony failed to claim his US$10. And as for the boa, it would appear that he was one of the unlucky ones. For despite the snake hunts, the reward money. The and the increasingly frenzied attempts by locals to rid Aruba of its new and unwanted visitors, the boas look likely to continue hitchhiking their way around the island for some time to come. They're just good at adapting, robert told me. Far too good at it. We want everyone to love Aruba, but the boas are making themselves a little bit too much at home.
- [27:40]
B
Rob Crossan there with the hitchhiking boas of Aruba, bringing this edition to a close. I'll be back next Saturday morning with more stories from around the world. I do hope you'll join us. Until then, goodbye.