Creatively Aging

True confessions time: I’m a fan of mystery novels – most often British. And so naturally my eye is grabbed by a portrait of Dame Agatha Christie in The New York Times Sunday Magazine recently. I was even more drawn by the headline Literary Alzheimer’s. Apparently last March a pair of academic researchers analyzed the text of Christie’s fourteen novels and determined that “Christie’s lexicon dcreased with age, while both the number of vague words she employed and phrases she repeated increased”. Authors Lancashire and Hirst suggest “”the question is not early style versus late style. but the late style of someone who is elderly but healthy versus the late style of someone who is elderly but not cognitively healthy’”. Lancashire and Hirst intend to analyze the work of P.D. James (80+ and healthy) as well as authors such as Ross MacDonald (known to have suffered from dementia).

This is all the more interesting in light of the Nun’s Study and its insights into lanaguage sophistication in youth and the likelihood of developing observable signs of dementia in later life.