As young women, many of the now elderly nuns had been required to submit a handwritten autobiographical essay to the Sisterhood before they were allowed to take their vows. These essays were written when the women were – on average – only 22 years old, decades before any would display any symptoms of dementia. And yet, astonishingly, the scientists discovered clues in their writing that predicted what would happen to them far in the future. The researchers analysed the language in each of the essays for its complexity and found a connection between how articulate the nuns were as young women
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