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An ability to read and write, even with little or no schooling,
could offer protection
Scientific
American: 11.13.2019 by Gary Stix
Socrates
famously railed against the evils of writing. The sage warned that it would
“introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not
practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing.”
He
got a few things wrong. For one, people nurture Socrates’ memory because of all
of the books written about him. But he also was off the mark in his musings
about a forgetfulness of the soul. If anything, it appears that just the
opposite holds: a study of hundreds of illiterate people living at the northern
end of an island considered to be a world media capital roundly contradicts the
father of Western philosophy.
Evaluations
of the elderly in the environs of Manhattan’s Washington Heights (the
neighborhood immortalized by a Lin-Manuel Miranda musical) reveal that the very
act of reading or writing—largely apart from any formal education—may help
protect against the forgetfulness of dementia. “The people who were illiterate
in the study developed dementia at an earlier age than people who were literate
in the study,” says Jennifer J. Manly, senior author of the
paper, which appeared on November 13 in Neurology.
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The
paper raises an obvious idea for future research: “Could we change and lower
that dementia risk by intervening at midlife or later life by helping people to
learn to read and write?” says Miguel Arce Rentería, the first author of the
study. “That’s an empirical question.” READ
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