MargaretC

Cognitive reserve. It’s not that their brains don’t age; it’s that super agers seem to be able to overcome the wear and tear that cognitively average people succumb to: age-related issues like inflammation or clogged blood vessels. In fact, postmortem studies of the brains of super agers reveal that some had the clinical pathology of Alzheimer’s

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The river has great wisdom and whispers its secrets to the hearts of men,” Mark Twain said. It’s not just Macfarlane who bears this out but the three people he spends most time with on his travels: the eerily intuitive mycologist Giuliana in Ecuador, the geomancer Wayne in Canada and the ecologist Yuvan in India with his “ductile, fast-flowing... See more

One way to prune is to see where best-book lists overlap, on the theory that books that appear most often must be really worth your while. That is what a website called thegreatestbooks.org has done. Its creator, Shane Sherman, a computer programmer in Texas, has used more than 300 lists to come up with a list of lists, which he calls, not entirely... See more