A story of ninety year-old nuns
In a piece published on page 109 of the special issue of La Recherche (a scientific periodical) on the aging process (July- August 1999), we read the following : “avoidance of intellectual activities is a major factor in aging badly. Witness a study on 170 nuns in Minnesota, showing that those who aged worse were those who had received the least schooling.”
This single piece of evidence from a study of a small sample of an admittedly quite unusual population seems to afford a weak argument in favor of the rule announced. Do these Minnesota nuns have the peculiarity of, precisely, not having any peculiarity ? Nuntheless, the rule itself may be true. We have also been spared the correlation, probably not very close, between the quality ( ?) of schooling and intellectual activity in adulthood.
Mélanie Leclair
October 1999
Penumbra, 2001 June
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