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Harvard releases a job-related study

By Ed Goldman

A new Harvard Medical School study suggests that people who drive taxis and ambulances for a living have a lower risk of dying from Alzheimer’s disease than many of us—especially if they were doing so before the invention of GPS, which tells us not only where to turn and how long it will take for us to arrive there but also what we should be wearing when we disembark and if we should have brought a lovely gift to our host. 

To digress, I’ll admit I may have an especially aggressive GPS device. I call it the Goldman (rather than Global) Positioning System and its voice may be that of my late Jewish mother. This is especially ironic considering once she started driving at the age of 42 she saw no need to ever make left turns.

Oops. I appear to have drifted. I hope this isn’t the onset of anything more onerous than having skipped my morning meds. Or did I? I recall reaching for the little jars but can’t, in all honesty, recall my tapping a few pills into my hand, tossing them back into my throat and flushing them into my body politic with tap water.

Hmm. Maybe I’ll retrace my steps. Okay. I awoke. I threw off my cozy duvet. I found the room chilly and threw back on my cozy duvet. An hour passed. I awoke. I…     

—Yes, many of us spend an inordinate amount of time wondering if Alzheimer’s will swallow us up at some point. To stall off or possibly eradicate that tragic prospect, we do crossword puzzles whose clues and answers are words we never heard of, play Scrabble marathons by ourselves (using only Esperanto terminology), learn languages we’ll never use and, most important of all, try not to worry when we forget why we entered a room.

“It’s begun!” is a rather hysterical reaction to misplacing our phone or forgetting the Alamo, for example. Sometimes, we just happen to forget those things, without needing an assist from the sinister forces of disease. On any given day, we also may have more on our minds than the locale of our phone or the history of Texas.

The new research is confusing, suggesting as it does that if our work requires memorizing complex data, we may be protecting ourselves from future infirmity. Maybe, maybe not. I know I was shocked when Peter Falk, TV’s beloved “Columbo,” succumbed to Alzheimer’s in 2011. If you ever watched his show, you might have marveled, as I did, at the pages of complicated dialogue Falk had to memorize for each episode—usually when delivering the denouement to the villain and the villain to the LAPD—in what often seemed to be one extended three-to-five-minute “take.”

Now, to stage actors, the memorization of a few minutes of dialogue is a laughable achievement, since they need to memorize entire plays that can last two hours and longer. But they get to/are paid to deliver those lines from five to eight times a week, and repetition really does make the brain grow fonder.