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Yesterday Ammachi passed away.

Around 3-4 weeks ago I spoke to Ammachi on a Whatsapp video call, she asked me how my studies were going and if it were time for exams. I explained that I’d graduated and that there were no exams left and spoke for a bit before switching to speak to other relatives. A few minutes later, Ammachi again came on call to ask me if how my studies were going and I had exams to attend.

Her memory had deteriorated and was now having trouble recalling events of even just 3 minutes back.

Two-three weeks ago she fell on her way to the bathroom, this was probably the starting.

Two weeks ago she was found in bed, unconscious and not responding to calls. Doctors found blood in her head and suggested we not do surgery since she wasn’t fit enough for it.

Some days later she was released from the hospital, nothing had changed, she was unconscious as before, breathing and body perfectly functional but unresponsive to stimulus.

Everyone knew that the end was probably near for her. Parents did uprashima. A prayer the priest does when we believe the person won’t make it.

And yesterday she passed away, in her sleep. At 88 years of age.

Time tends to erase the memory of your loved ones. How saddening that is.

So I thought I’d write down all I can remember of her, so that it may be remembered a short while longer.

She was perhaps a bit unlike every other granny.
She:

Once threw a sickle at my fathers shin when he was young, and had caused trouble.

Would create bitter gourd juice and make chachan drink it. It was painful to watch him drink it.

Once cooked a squirrel that fell from a a tree and died. No one else but her tried the squirrel. Everyone felt bad for the squirrel, she thought it was delicious.

At one point child me for some reason thought sambar and uppumavu was a good combination, she went and made sambar specifically because I mentioned this and started giving me and my brother this combination. The sambar was just good.

My mother used to claim that Ammachi was able to cut through vegetables faster than anyone else she knew or had seen. I never got to see this for myself. Ammachi later had far too much time on her hands and liked to take her time cutting vegetables.

Cutting vegetables, watching overly dramatic Indian tv serials and eating fruits were something of a passion of hers.

Fruits would always go bad when she wasn’t around, never when she was however. Walk for a bit through the house. Banana. Walk walk walk. Banana. Repeat with new fruit etc.

When Ammachi was around, demand for fruit would go up dramatically. There was a sense of “If I don’t eat a fruit now, there won’t be any left!”.

She loved pindi, which is the stem of Banana Trees. Pindi and all the other vegetables she used to eat was often considered the source of her health. And boy was she healthy, for her age. Even my parents were seeing troubles in their blood test, my grandmother wasn’t.

The Indian drama shows she used to watch all had grannies that were far less healthy and needed a wheelchair to move around in. So did many of the people around her. She however was, pretty much fine.. She coveted the attention the worn out grandparents were getting from their children and grandchildren. And she’d pretend to be more sick than she actually was. We could all see through this guise though.

Recently though, we could tell that she wasn’t pretending, her age had caught up to her.

She would bring me bugs she had killed or had found dead somewhere. Thinking back on it now, kid me would have likely found this interesting. We usually reacted with ‘Why is she bringing me this dead bug? Throw it out!’.

Sometimes she would find dead people in the local news paper charama column and come show them to me. “Look this person died! He/she was xyz of xyz. You don’t know them?”. These little things went unappreciated, some stupid feature at work going to production always got priority. “Aaah yeah I don’t know them..”, “Ammachi, someone somewhere died, it doesn’t concern me”. Now looking back.. that feature could have waited, I could have made some time.

I created an Instagram account for her to doom-scroll on. ‘ammachi80years’. A kids account with age restrictions turned on, specifically made for her. It worked, but the touch screen and the plethora of features in android confused her and a week later, she switched back to her indestructible nokia phone. Android came with too many feature for her to shoot herself in the foot with. A missed opportunity, could have been infinite dopamine and her window into modern society. She didn’t have a infinite social media feed educating her.

I told myself and her that I’d get her books to read, to help her kill time. Time to kill, is something she had too much of. I never did this truly, never got her those books from the library. Something always took priority over this.

I knew I was at least in part fix her boredom issue, and it’s awful that I never got around to it. There was always tomorrow. Tomorrow is gone now. Ammachi has permanently left us.

My friend recently made an interesting observation, watching movies can be draining. Well yeah perhaps. But to make this more clear, we’ve got to think of watching two movies or even three movies at a time.

Then you can actually feel the drain.

What’s the problem with this? Movies are often associated with resting or recreational activities, perhaps activities that don’t require much mental effort. But it’s instead possible that movies provide no rest and instead are quite draining.

During strenuous work, we sometimes like to watch and episode or a series to re-charge and come back to work more energized or motivated, and often times, the episode does not produce that energizing effect.

Anyway, I wanna know, if I were to study a certain topic, what medium should I study that in? From a text book or a doc? Or a youtube video lecture perhaps?

After a small amount of research, it was noticed that videos are probably more draining that text, one because, the video moves at it’s own pace, not at the pace you’re comfortable with, so you would then have to operate at a faster pace in order to keep up, and because there is more information to process.

But also, if you’re imaginative like me, then your mind does a lot of imagining and visualization as you’re reading. Which could also lead you to become distracted by thoughts and get side-tracked. Video having a set pace, does imply the subject will come to an end within a specified duration. So accumulated drain over time is likely reduced for’ information consumed through the video medium as opposed to written text.

Written text while not as draining, could take far longer to complete, resulting in a stronger draining effect overall.

Anyway, I remember watching a veritasium video about something similar before. I think he summarized that learning is probably best done through a combination of all media.

I remember reading Sam Walton’s autobiography and thinking, oh my god, what a show off. The book was packed with instances of this guy winning over and over again. It made the whole thing feel strangely boring.

Stories are fun when there is trouble, when the main character struggles and then overcomes it. Sam Walton did go through trials and tribulations, but he seemed to recover too quickly. It almost felt fake, or at least exaggerated.

I did not think much about this for years. Until yesterday.

A friend and I spent some time talking about the impact of being social on mood and on general success in life. Success here being tightly coupled with mood, because you simply cannot perform when you are constantly down in the dumps.

For loners like me, the boost in mood and productivity from spending time with a good friend is almost immediate. It is hard to miss once you notice it.

I am overly interested in productivity and self actualization, and because of that I tend to self isolate. In my head, that time can always be repurposed for work. When my friend came to spend their vacation with me, something unexpected happened. My mood lifted, and my ability to work improved noticeably.

That was when it clicked. Maybe Sam Walton was not exaggerating how quickly he bounced back. He was a frequent churchgoer and had strong social circles. It is entirely possible that his baseline mood and energy levels were simply higher more often than not. When hardship hit, he recovered faster because he was not doing it alone.

I find this fascinating. Sometimes you see people who seem capable of carrying several times your own load without burning out, and you wonder how they do it. I do not have a complete answer, but I am convinced that social circles are part of it.

Humans are not built to function in isolation. From an evolutionary and neurological perspective, our brains are wired for connection. Being around others, whether friends, coworkers, or a church community, can dramatically improve mood, focus, and productivity.

When you interact with people in a supportive environment, your brain releases neurotransmitters like dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin. These chemicals are associated with motivation, bonding, and emotional stability. They reduce stress and make effort feel less taxing. Tasks that feel heavy when you are alone often feel lighter when someone else is simply present, even if they are not directly helping.

Church communities are a strong example of this effect. They offer regular social contact, shared purpose, and predictable structure. This lowers cognitive load. Your brain no longer has to constantly fight loneliness, boredom, or uncertainty. Instead of reaching for quick dopamine through YouTube or social media, your nervous system is already regulated through human connection.

There is also an accountability effect. When others are around, your brain naturally shifts into a cooperative mode. Distraction becomes less rewarding, and focus comes more easily. This is not about pressure. It is about alignment. Your behavior starts to synchronize with the rhythm of the group.

Community also buffers stress. Research consistently shows that people with strong social networks recover faster from setbacks, experience lower baseline anxiety, and maintain better long term mental health. Churches often provide emotional support during difficult periods, which helps keep stress hormones like cortisol in check. The result is better clarity, more energy, and improved self discipline.

In short, social connection is not a luxury or a distraction from productivity. It is a biological requirement. Communities like churches work not only because of belief systems, but because they satisfy deep neurological and psychological needs that modern, isolated lifestyles often ignore.

There are groups of people who don’t really dream, ever. They can’t really visualize things in their mind. People say they lack a minds eye. Researchers think this is a spectrum, going from no capacity to visualize images and scenarios to having vivid imagination and recollection, to the point where it may be like reality.

I tried extended this idea. I noticed I have a rather vivid imagination, and have often relied on it to solve problems for me. This includes math, reasonably long derivation, somewhat complex problem solving and such.

Free body mechanics in physics for instance would come naturally to me, since the scenario in question can be visualized with mass, direction of gravity etc, and I can just watch what happens when the scenario imagined is subjected to external variables.

Solving of most math, including most differentiation and integration problems could simply be completed in my mind.

I also used to be able to solve hundreds of math and science problems on a single piece of paper, since the pen I used had no ink in it. The pen was merely there to simulate writing, and helped me keep items in my mind.

So this vivid imagination really helped me. And I’d come to rely on it regularly. Since I didn’t know about this, I assumed I was just smart.

But when I tried to learn quantum mechanics or relativity… things started falling apart.

1 dimension – You imagine a line.

2 dimensions – 2 lines, a plane maybe.

3 dimensions – We’re going 3D now, this covers everything in daily life.

4 dimensions – Hmm.. how would I imagine that?..

5 dimensions – Um..

A 100 dimensions – I am so lost..

n dimensions – I’m screwed.

Loads of subjects deal with higher dimensions than we are used to. But if you rely on visualization to understand things and store information, you’re pretty much screwed when dealing with these higher dimensions. Unless you put in deliberate effort to deal with this specific issue – though I haven’t done this, so I can’t vouch for it.

People with Aphantasia, had a much easier time dealing with higher dimensions. Since it’s just a few extra variables on a piece of paper. While it made my head ache and made little logical sense.

A friend of mine, who was a phenomenal cartoonist, regularly scored a 100% on history tests. When asked how he learns, he just said that, the entire textbook was just a huge story to him, and the story just replays in his head during tests.

So they should start educating students on this while they’re in school. So they don’t pick up subjects they don’t know how to deal with, or so that they can pick up the skills required for such tasks early.