Idea Density
Update: A report on the nun study. It’s interesting.
Women who scored poorly on measures of cognitive ability as young adults were found to be at higher risk for Alzheimer’s disease and poor cognitive function in late life, according to a new report by researchers at the University of Kentucky. The ground-breaking study of nearly 100 nuns found that the complexity of the sisters’ writings as young women had a great deal to do with how they fared cognitively later in life. Of the nuns who died, 90 percent of those with Alzheimer’s disease confirmed at autopsy had low linguistic ability in early life, compared with only 13 percent in those without evidence of the disease.
And another.
Sister Nicolette’s autobiography, written when she was 20, was full of what Dr. Snowdon calls “idea density,” many thoughts woven into a small number of words, a trait correlating closely with nuns who later escaped Alzheimer’s. One sentence in Sister Nicolette’s essay, for example, reads, “After I finished the eighth grade in 1921 I desired to become an aspirant at Mankato but I myself did not have the courage to ask the permission of my parents so Sister Agreda did it in my stead and they readily gave their consent.” Compare that to the essay of another Mankato nun, who is in her late 90’s and has performed steadily worse on the memory tests. The nun, who sat quietly by a window the other day, wrote in her essay, “After I left school, I worked in the post-office.”
So all those people who try to claim that it’s actually better to be ignorant and incurious and that that’s why Bush is a better guy than Kerry, are not only being silly and anti-intellectual, they’re encouraging everyone to increase their risk of Alzheimer’s. So yaboosucks!
I know, I know. Don’t bother to say it. It’s chicken and egg, it’s causation and correlation. It’s not clear whether the cognitive ability and idea density are causative or just correlative, so it’s not clear whether anything we do deliberately will make any difference. I know. But still. It might. Why take that chance, hmmm?
But still. It might. Why take that chance, hmmm?
Benson’s Wager?
Ha! Just so.
Do Bush and other Christians care about Alzheimer’s and other diseases of old age?
After all , they think their immortal souls are going to spend eternity in heaven.
Just a thought.
Jason: Probably. Only Christian Scientists and a few other fringe sects spurn the blessings of modern medicine. Even if you believe in an afterlife, you probably don’t want to spend your terrestrial years in agonizing pain or humiliating debility. Unless of course we’re talking about stem cells. Then all bets are off.
And anyway, whether they care or not, they’re not likely to make the connection I’m making here.
But they don’t make the more obvious connections either. Or rather, they don’t care. That’s one of the things I despise most about Bush (although that’s a longish list). That for his short-term advantage he’s happy to purvey the endlessly repeated message that education and learning and thinking are not only not necessary or useful or valuable, but downright bad. I mean – he might as well go into classrooms and pick up books with an air of disdain and say ‘What’re you messing with all this elitist liberal stuff for? You wanna grow up to be elitist liberal snobs?’
“I mean – he might as well go into classrooms and pick up books with an air of disdain and say ‘What’re you messing with all this elitist liberal stuff for?”
That reminds me of a Bill Hicks joke where he is in a dinner in red-neck country. He picks up a menu to decide what to order and the waitress sees this and in a drawl anounces “So! We got ourselves a reader”
Thinking hurts. Best to just go with the flow.
Ha! That’s hilarious.
I meant, so we got a reader is hilarious.
As for ‘thinking hurts’ – you know the Nazis had a saying, ‘to think is to doubt.’
“If the sun and moon should doubt/They’d immediately go out.”
Look at what happened to Hamlet. That’s where all your fancy cogitatin’ gets ya.
This reminds me a little of that listening-to-Mozart-boosts-your-IQ hoopla a few years ago. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, but this seems somehow beside the point.
Aren’t thinking and learning worth doing anyway, even if they didn’t prevent Alzheimer’s. Hell, even if they caused Alzheimer’s, I’d say they were worth the cost.
Karl: Sure, thinking hurts. But as they say, “No pain, no gain.” Suck it up, wimp!
“Aren’t thinking and learning worth doing anyway”
Yes. Of course. But the Alzheimer’s thing is an additional reason.
And in fact I think the two are in a sense connected. That is, thinking and learning may do something to the brain that makes it less liable to Alzheimer’s – and what they do to the brain is probably why we think they are worth doing anyway. I mean it’s not random. If thinking and learning prevented arthritis or warts, I would be far less interested, but it appears that what they do is prevent us from getting stupider. In a sense that’s why we think they’re worth doing anyway, right? Because they help us think, understand, go on learning, and the like. That’s why we don’t want to get Alzheimer’s – we don’t want to get stupider – we want to go on trying to understand. So I think it’s not really beside the point.
“But the Alzheimer’s thing is an additional reason.”
Well, it’s not a medical fact yet, or even an hypothesis with a lot of evidence behind it. There are plenty of cases of brainy, restlessly curious people who succumbed to the dreaded disease. Not that I’m arguing for the blessings of ignorance and dullness. I’m just saying the evidence is awfully slender so far. But hey, if we can scare more people into using their brains a little more often, I guess that’s a good thing.
An afterthoght: Putting warning labels on packs of cigarettes didn’t really stop many people from smoking, even though the medical evidence was overwhelming that it ruined your health and shortened your life. It wasn’t until it became socially unacceptable to smoke that smoking rates declined.[1] Using the patented Keith Burgess-Jackson method of analogizing, I suggest that maybe the best way to encourage rational thought is to make irrational thought “uncool” and social death….
[1] Unless we believe Karl’s assertion that smoking prevents Alzheimer’s. Then we are in a quandary.
Yeah, true; I should have said ‘the Alzheimer’s thing if true’. The Alzheimer’s thing if there is a thing. It’s just interesting and suggestive for now.
“I suggest that maybe the best way to encourage rational thought is to make irrational thought “uncool” and social death….”
Well exactly. I keep trying. But does anyone listen?
Seriously though, that’s one of the things I loathe most about Republicans at the moment. There have to be millions of Republicans who really don’t like irrationalism and anti-intellectualism, if only because it’s bad for business (and professionalism and competence in general) – they ought to do more to resist the whole bogus anti-‘elitism’ approach. But it works, so mostly they don’t.
Keep slugging, OB. You’re doing the Lord’s work. Bless you and may the angels protect you!
I don’t know that Bill Hicks joke, but the one that sticks with me is where he’s in a restaurant, with a book, and the waitress comes up and says:
“What are you reading for?”
NOT…what are you reading.
What are you reading FOR.
“Well, I read for a lot of reasons, but one of them is so I don’t end up a fucking waffle waitress.”
The other Bill Hicks joke (well, more of an anecdote) concerns the time he was in a diner somewhere in the South, reading a book while waiting for his meal. Two or three rednecks come up to him and announce, “Well, lookee here, boys. Looks like we got ourselves a reader.”
I also like his anecdote about the time he did one of his atheistic riffs in a comedy club in the the Bible belt. Some drunken hooligans came up to him after show and started shoving him around. “We didn’t like what you said about Our Lord there, boy. We’re Christians.” Hicks replied, “So forgive me, then.”
I miss Bill.
(Should I have put in more logical connectives for ChrisM?)
snicker
‘What are you reading for?’ Yep, that pretty much sums it up. That was the [unvoiced] question of the co-worker I mentioned awhile ago. It kind of bristled all over him without actually being put into words.
I do not know thees Bill Hicks. Clearly a serious gap in my knowing stuff (one of several trillion).