Could you predict who got Alzheimer’s in their eighties simply by analyzing writing samples authored in their twenties? It’s all correlational work for sure, which is why I used the word “potentially.” But real research fruit was obtained. The writing samples were analyzed for linguistic density, a complexity measure, and the number of ideas per sentence. Eighty percent of the nuns whose writings didn’t meet specific neurolinguistic benchmarks—who scored low on linguistic ability—developed Alzheimer’s. Only 10 percent of those who scored high on those same benchmarks did. Idea density was
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