Take your thinking to a higher level.
Have you heard about the School Sisters of Notre Dame? This order of Catholic nuns is dedicated to education and firmly believe that the idle mind is the devil’s workshop. So they have vowed to keep their minds active. When not doing their educational work and worship, many of the good sisters play games, do puzzles, follow current events and such.
A number of years ago, this group came to the attention of the medical science world as they were outliving the general population and showing fewer signs of Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. A study was begun to monitor their living habits and where upon their deaths many have been donating their brains to science.
The main question being explored in the study is “What factors in early, mid, and late life increase the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other brain diseases such as stroke?” Other research questions relate to the determinants of longevity and the quality of life in the elderly. Some very interesting discoveries have been made, particularly fascinating for people interested in improving their creative thinking.
One such revelation is that upon examining their brains after death, many of the sisters do in fact have Alzheimer’s even if they don’t exactly show it. Because of their diverse and dynamic mental activity, it is believed they have greater healthy resources in other areas of the brain to often take over some of the performance when other portions lose functionality with age.
“The Nun Study” funded by The National Institute on Aging represents the largest brain donor population in the world, although this phenomena is not unique to this group. This religious community’s closed population and unique commitment to education makes for interesting study. Nearly 700 Sisters are participating, as of this writing.
Many close to this phenomena agree that an active mind throughout one’s life puts an individual in a better position to “manage” the onset of mental aging, where, when certain neurological “pathways” begin to “dry up” (neurons, dendrites, synapses, etc.), other healthier “pathways” can often do their work.
The conclusion for the context of this blog is that diverse mental activity is not just a way to keep the mind open and nimble, to come up with fresh ideas and solve problems, but it is also a good strategy to insure that your brain maintains peak performance in general for a good long time. In an era when our life expectancy is increasing greatly thanks mostly to advances in drugs and medical procedures, extended mental abilities might be a pretty good hedge against a life of daily b-i-n-g-o, for those looking for greater adventure and continued intellectual growth.
If you’d like to know more on this fascinating topic I suggest that you enter “Nun Study” into a search engine and find a comfortable chair. There is a great deal to be learned for all of us in this study.
