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Early Language Abilities May Protect Memory Decades Later
Language Skills May Ward Off Alzheimer’s, Dementia
By CRYSTAL PHEND
MedPage Today Staff Writer

July 9, 2009—

Women with sophisticated language as young adults were less likely to suffer the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease in old age — even when the characteristic brain lesions associated with Alzheimer’s were present at death, researchers found.

The importance of these skills — measured by the “idea density” in an essay they wrote early in adulthood — held for women with intact cognition, regardless of whether a brain autopsy showed the hallmark plaques and tangles of Alzheimer’s, Dr. Juan Troncoso of Johns Hopkins University and colleagues reported online in the journal Neurology.

The findings add to the evidence for a so-called “cognitive reserve” that protects against the effects of neurological disease, according to Dr. Robert Stern, a professor of neurology and Alzheimer’s expert at Boston University, who was not involved in the study.

Language abilities — like other measures of this reserve, such as years of education — appear to be linked to “bigger and better brains,” with more connections between neurons, he said. Rather than decreasing the likelihood that a person will develop Alzheimer’s, it apparently staves off some clinical symptoms of the underlying disease, such as memory loss.

Exercising the mind early in life may help build a protective cognitive reserve, although studies like this cannot prove that these mental exercises are effective, added Dr. Samuel Gandy of Mount Sinai Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center in New York.

“The notion of recommending language acquisition as a kind of mental exercise that might lower one’s risk for Alzheimer’s disease follows logically,” Gandy said.

And even if it doesn’t help in the end, language skills certainly can’t hurt, he said.

Alzheimer’s disease has puzzled researchers because the same degree of damage to the brain causes severe symptoms in some people, but not in others, Troncoso’s group noted.

To determine what factors earlier in life might produce these differences, the researchers looked at a particularly Alzheimer’s-vulnerable area of the brain during autopsies of 38 Roman Catholic nuns.
Language Skills May Stave Off Cognitive Impairment

Autopsies showed that women with known Alzheimer’s disease in this group had significant shrinkage of certain parts of the brain compared with those who had no symptoms or brain lesions.

But the women with asymptomatic Alzheimer’s disease — who showed no cognitive impairment before death but showed Alzheimer’s disease-type brain lesions during an autopsy — had markedly larger compartments of key cells in their brains compared with all the other groups of women.

These features may indicate that the neurons in the brains of these women repaired themselves or grew and made new connections to compensate for damage, the researchers said.

Across these groups, there were no differences in age at death, education level, or time from last cognitive evaluation to death that could explain the results.

However, language ability earlier in life did appear to correlate with whether these women showed Alzheimer’s symptoms.

The researchers also analyzed essays that 14 of the women had written as they entered the convent five or six decades earlier.

What they found was that women without old-age cognitive impairments — including two with asymptomatic Alzheimer’s disease — had expressed a significantly higher number of ideas for every 10 words in the essay than did the one patient with mild cognitive impairment and the five with Alzheimer’s disease.

Still, while the researchers called this a fascinating observation, they cautioned that the study is probably far too small to draw any solid conclusions about the benefits of a limber mind when it comes to warding off Alzheimer’s.

But though Gandy agreed that the study could not get at the mechanism behind the association, he noted that language skills are complex and exercise sensory, cognitive and motor areas of the brain at the same time.

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Why does a diploma from Harvard cost $100,000 more than a similar piece of paper from City College? Why might a BMW cost $25,000 more than a Subaru WRX with equally fast acceleration? Why do “sophisticated” consumers demand 16-gigabyte iPhones and “fair trade” coffee from Starbucks?

If you ask market researchers or advertising executives, you might hear about the difference between “rational” and “emotional” buying decisions, or about products falling into categories like “hedonic” or “utilitarian” or “positional.” But Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, says that even the slickest minds on Madison Avenue are still in the prescientific dark ages.

Instead of running focus groups and spinning theories, he says, marketers could learn more by administering scientifically calibrated tests of intelligence and personality traits. If marketers (or their customers) understood biologists’ new calculations about animals’ “costly signaling,” Dr. Miller says, they’d see that Harvard diplomas and iPhones send the same kind of signal as the ornate tail of a peacock.

Sometimes the message is as simple as “I’ve got resources to burn,” the classic conspicuous waste demonstrated by the energy expended to lift a peacock’s tail or the fuel guzzled by a Hummer. But brand-name products aren’t just about flaunting transient wealth. The audience for our signals — prospective mates, friends, rivals — care more about the permanent traits measured in tests of intelligence and personality, as Dr. Miller explains in his new book, “Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior.”

Suppose, during a date, you casually say, “The sugar maples in Harvard Yard were so beautiful every fall term.” Here’s what you’re signaling, as translated by Dr. Miller:

“My S.A.T. scores were sufficiently high (roughly 720 out of 800) that I could get admitted, so my I.Q. is above 135, and I had sufficient conscientiousness, emotional stability and intellectual openness to pass my classes. Plus, I can recognize a tree.”

Or suppose a young man, after listening to the specifications of the newest iPhone or hearing about a BMW’s “Servotronic variable-ratio power steering,” says to himself, “Those features sound awesome.” Here’s Dr. Miller’s translation:

“Those features can be talked about in ways that will display my general intelligence to potential mates and friends, who will bow down before my godlike technopowers, which rival those of Iron Man himself.”

Most of us will insist there are other reasons for going to Harvard or buying a BMW or an iPhone — and there are, of course. The education and the products can yield many kinds of rewards. But Dr. Miller says that much of the pleasure we derive from products stems from the unconscious instinct that they will either enhance or signal our fitness by demonstrating intelligence or some of the Big Five personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, stability and extraversion.

In a series of experiments, Dr. Miller and other researchers found that people were more likely to expend money and effort on products and activities if they were first primed with photographs of the opposite sex or stories about dating.

After this priming, men were more willing to splurge on designer sunglasses, expensive watches and European vacations. Women became more willing to do volunteer work and perform other acts of conspicuous charity — a signal of high conscientiousness and agreeableness, like demonstrating your concern for third world farmers by spending extra for Starbucks’s “fair trade” coffee.

These signals can be finely nuanced, as Dr. Miller parses them in his book. The “conspicuous precision” of a BMW or a Lexus helps signal the intelligence of all the owners, but the BMW’s “conspicuous reputation” also marks its owner as more extraverted and less agreeable (i.e., more aggressive). Owners of Toyotas and Hondas are signaling high conscientiousness by driving reliable and economical cars.

But once you’ve spent the money, once you’ve got the personality-appropriate appliance or watch or handbag, how much good are these signals actually doing you? Not much, Dr. Miller says. The fundamental consumerist delusion, as he calls it, is that purchases affect the way we’re treated.

The grand edifice of brand-name consumerism rests on the narcissistic fantasy that everyone else cares about what we buy. (It’s no accident that narcissistic teenagers are the most brand-obsessed consumers.) But who else even notices? Can you remember what your partner or your best friend was wearing the day before yesterday? Or what kind of watch your boss has?

A Harvard diploma might help get you a date or a job interview, but what you say during the date or conversation will make the difference. An elegantly thin Skagen watch might send a signal to a stranger at a cocktail party or in an airport lounge, but even if it were noticed, anyone who talked to you for just a few minutes would get a much better gauge of your intelligence and personality.

To get over your consuming obsessions, Dr. Miller suggests exercises like comparing the relative costs and pleasures of the stuff you’ve bought. (You can try the exercise at nytimes.com/tierneylab.) It may seem odd that we need these exercises — why would natural selection leave us with such unproductive fetishes? — but Dr. Miller says it’s not surprising.

“Evolution is good at getting us to avoid death, desperation and celibacy, but it’s not that good at getting us to feel happy,” he says, calling our desire to impress strangers a quirky evolutionary byproduct of a smaller social world.

“We evolved as social primates who hardly ever encountered strangers in prehistory,” Dr. Miller says. “So we instinctively treat all strangers as if they’re potential mates or friends or enemies. But your happiness and survival today don’t depend on your relationships with strangers. It doesn’t matter whether you get a nanosecond of deference from a shopkeeper or a stranger in an airport.”