Taxi drivers hardly ever die of Alzheimer’s – how advanced psychological maps and spatial reasoning give protection to your mind

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Taxi and ambulance drivers are much less most probably than staff in nearly another task to die of Alzheimer’s illness. That used to be the sudden results of a 2024 find out about analyzing the loss of life certificate of just about 9 million folks within the U.S.

Those findings stopped me in my tracks as a result of the ones two jobs depend at the similar factor as my very own paintings: maps.

I’ve spent greater than 20 years gazing maps. No longer paper maps on a wall, however virtual ones with more than one layers: flood barriers draped over census blocks, automobile crash scorching spots plotted in opposition to highway geometry, and satellite tv for pc readings of rainfall stitched throughout river basins. A lot of my paintings as a civil and environmental engineer is completed thru GIS – this is, geographic data techniques. Engineers like me grasp a number of spatial relationships of their minds immediately, reasoning about the place issues sit down relative to each other throughout scales starting from a town block to a complete watershed.

I all the time assumed that spatial reasoning throughout map layers used to be purely skilled. However that find out about on taxi and ambulance drivers made me wonder if all that psychological paintings could be doing one thing excellent to the mind.

Taxi driving force brains

Of the 9 million loss of life certificate from January 2020 to December 2022 that researchers tested, taxi and ambulance drivers had the bottom…

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Author : bq3anews

Publish date : 2026-08-07 05:30:00

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