A regular refrain from my mother was, “I wish I’d become a teacher”. She would have made a very good teacher: she taught us at home when we were little. She taught a French-speaking friend’s daughter to speak English.
She taught me how to teach my children to read and write. She had exactly the right approach: she was patient, curious, made learning fun, and was a voracious reader. Dr Trine Holt Edwin, a geriatrician and postdoctoral fellow at the Oslo Clinical Dementia Research group at Oslo University Hospital, in Norway, recently authored a study that examined the connection between cognitive impairment and dementia in later life and occupation in midlife.
A bigger or better cognitive reserve increases the brain’s resilience and flexibility, and allows for cognitive performance that is better than expected later in life, given the degree of life-course-related brain changes or disease. The cognitive reserve hypothesis, she says, presupposes that “cognitive abilities acquired through education and other cognitively stimulating activities throughout the lifespan can delay the onset of mild cognitive impairment and dementia”. Holt Edwin’s study, of more than 7,000 Norwegians across 305 different occupations, found that those who held the least mentally challenging – or menial – jobs had a 66 per cent greater risk of mild cognitive impairment, and a 31 per cent greater risk of dementia, after the age of 70 compared with those in more mentally demanding posi.