In his book How To Prevent Dementia, professor of neurology Dr Richard Restak said that how we describe our jobs may be linked to our dementia risk.
He referenced a decades-long study involving nuns which found that how participants described their pre-convent work in their youth seemed to be linked to how likely they were to develop dementia over time.
“The best functioning nuns [in old age] differed from their counterparts who had succumbed to dementia by what [the study author] termed cognitive density: many thoughts and ideas woven into few sentences and paragraphs,” Dr Restak said.
More recent research from last year suggests that “verbal fluency” might be the strongest cognitive predictor of longevity too.
How does “verbal fluency” affect longevity?
A study published in Psychological Science looked at data from the Berlin Ageing Study alongside nine other cognitive studies.
Existing studies have linked intelligence to increased longevity, but the 2024 paper wanted to look at whether different kinds of intelligence were better or worse than others at predicting someone’s lifespan.
They divided the intelligence of the study’s participants into four groups
- Verbal fluency (how easily you can summon the right words for a situation – in this study, they asked participants to name as many animals as they could in 90 seconds),
- Perceptual speed (how quickly and accurately you can compare and assess patterns via visual cues),
- Verbal knowledge (the breadth of someone’s vocabulary), and
- Episodic memory (how well you can recall and contextualise personal memories).
The scientists then compared the results of these cognitive tests to how long their longevity predictor, which they co-created with the help of experts in multiple universities who are skilled at making joint multivariate longitudinal survival models, said participants were expected to live.
They found that verbal fluency was the only cognitive trait they measured which seemed to affect how long people were predicted to live. Those with better verbal fluency were expected to have longer lives.
Why might that be?
The scientists didn’t prove that verbal fluency definitely predicts a longer life, nor did they find out exactly why it may have such an effect.
But in an interview, the study’s lead author Dr Paolo Ghisletta said that verbal well-being could be a good indicator of ageing because it combines so many cognitive skills.
“All of these domains are just declining together, whether it’s cognition, personality, emotions, or biological, medical decline in general,” he suggested.
Indeed previous studies have linked how well someone can stand on one leg, a physical process which recruits multiple parts of the brain and body at once, to both longevity and dementia risk.